Match Report

Oxford MNVL vs Team Northumbria 2

Date:
Location:
Newcastle
Result:
3-1 (20-25, 25-23, 26-24, 25-23)
MVP:
Martijn
Players:
Han-Ru (setter), Mike (libero), Jamie and Paul (middles), Martijn and Gabri (outsides), Marcin (opposite)

Comments

"

Season finale and round-up for Men's NVL

Our season ended with an away match to Northumbria. These guys are based in Newcastle, and for those of you with poor geography, that's really far away. We went up the night before, and despite the movie game managed to navigate our way to a cheap hotel. Determined that we would be fully physically prepared for the match, we dined off Macky D's and take-out Chinese. Such zeal. And some pints.

The venue, build only last year, is amazing. One of the nicest I've ever been to. Apparently there's a basketball team that plays there, and pulls in a paying audience of 3000 every week. As for our opponents, whom we'd beaten in a tight five-setter before Christmas, they looked less intimidating than they had done. Athletic, but young.

We dropped the first set by a five point margin or so, playing pretty badly. After that, though, we picked things up. Every set was tight, won by the minimum two-point margin, but despite that there was a level of confidence about things that we haven't seen in a while. Our block was having problems sealing, so some hits went undefended into the middle of the court, and they all seemed to have a nasty serve - float, hard, and directed. Mike, playing libero, did an excellent job of orchestrating the serve receive, trying to mess with the server's heads. As we sometimes tend to do, we relied over-much on Martijn, but all in all it was a decent performance. Oh, I should add that Northumbria were an incredibly nice team - really friendly and owned up to several block touches.

With that win, we reached fourth in the second division. Not spectacular, but respectable, and the position we deserved. I'm particularly happy because I set myself the goal of reaching top half of the league, and we succeeded. Remember that we only scraped into the top of half of division three last year, and thus got 'promoted' to the new-look div 2 (merged with the bottom half of last year's div 2).

The season was a double-dip. We started the season poorly, losing to Chester away and Brentwood at home. Chester came third in the end, but were unimpressive in that first match. We picked things up and went on a run up to Christmas, beating Leeds (helped by one of their players getting injured) and Northumbria in an excellent match. That was probably our best team performance, with everyone coming off the bench with something to prove, and contributing to the team. After Christmas, we had an amazing match against Leeds, down two sets and 20-11, coming back to win in five. The Leeds coach should be losing sleep over that one - he subbed in a weaker player in the third and allowed us to sneak back in. Jon, setting, played an important role in that match - keeping calm and helping the team hold together.

After that, however, we had a horrendous period, losing in straight sets to Brentwood, Chester, Boathouse and RAF. The RAF game really hurt, because we should have done far better. We led in every set, but threw it away time and again. I've gone over it time and again, but just can't explain what went wrong. That was the lowest point of the season, because it was a match we should have won but didn't. Still, there were few enough of those. We finished off the season with a comfortable win over York and this rather less comfortable win over Northumbria.

We've had two seasons of poor results, partly due to lack of organisation, partly due to personality clashes. It felt good this year to have a solid squad, who got on with each other and were backed with good organisation. The three stand-out players for me were Scott, Marcin and Martijn. Scott improved massively, particularly his serve and defence. As for Marcin, he went from being a risky choice, who would either kill the ball or crash it out the back of the court, to being one of our most reliable scorers. Our go-to guy, however, was Martijn. Excellent serve-receive, amazing and incredibly reliable hitting, and a lazy sod in covering tips. His stability on court got us through many matches, and he thoroughly deserves the league MVP award.

All in all, a good solid year of volleyball. Hopefully it's a sign of things to come.

"

Report by Paul

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