After a couple promising wins over second place Orkelljunga in early January things took a turn for the worse. We went on the road and got smoked by a Linkoping team that is really coming on strong at the end of the season. From there we hosted first place Sollentuna and third place Falkenberg within four days of each other. Strong starts against both teams (including being up 2-1 and 18-14 on Falkenberg) ended up in a four and five set loss, respectively.
Luckily, this past weekend we had a road trip to Lund on the schedule. Lund is the last place team, having only earned one point in the standings all year, from a five set loss on the first Sunday of the season. Us being the northern-most team in the league and Lund being the southern-most (right by Malmö just across a bridge from Copenhagen), this match made for quite an adventure of a weekend.
It began Saturday morning getting on the first of three trains in seven hours in Tierp. After a transfer in Uppsala and one in Stockholm we only had four hours to go. The train wasn't that bad on the way there, much better than the normal back seat of the van that I normally spend my weekends in.
The match started out about as well as possible. We won the first game handily, 25-15. Everything went right and basically as long as we didn't make an error, we scored the point. The second game the tables turned. Lund is by no means a good offensive team, but they do a good job touching everything and they dig a ton of balls. That caught up to us in game two and we lost 25-23. After the halftime break, and some team attitude adjustment by yours truly, we knew all we needed to do was stick together and not make errors and there was no way we were going to lose this match.
We came out much better in game three and won relatively easily 25-19. Our offense was looking much better and our defense stepped up as much as theirs. Game four wasn't quite as good but we battled through it and won 25-23 on a missed serve. Finally we earned another three points and up to sixth place, not where we pictured being at this point in the season but moving in the right direction.
I should probably explain how playoffs work since we'll be there in three weeks. The top eight teams make the playoffs, those are already decided with Lund and Vingaker having been eliminated a couple weeks ago. The top four seeds (currently Sollentuna, Orkelljunga, Falkenberg and Linkoping) then pick who they want to play out of the 5-8 seeds. Sollentuna would pick first as of right now. Based on how we've played against Sollentuna,
Orkelljunga and Falkenberg, we highly doubt that they will pick us to play in the first round. So most likely we will end up playing whichever team ends up the fourth seed. From there it's best of five matches in each round. So if we hit a hot streak we know we can beat any team in the league three out of five times. It's just a matter of getting it done.
Moving back to the weekend, the next 24 hours were quite the adventure. Since we played on Saturday, and our normal Sunday matches kill any possibility of going out on the weekends, we had to take advantage and go out while we were down in Malmö, Sweden's third biggest city. We had a great, and late night bar hopping. But then came the dreaded early morning. At seven AM, we were back on our seven hour train ride home, most of us still in a zombie-like trance. Eventually we made it back to Tierp around three o'clock. Quite an adventure, but well worth it to finally get back in the win column. Vingaker at home this weekend...
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