All tied up

Based on how close we came to taking match one at their place, we were feeling pretty confident going in to our home match this Thursday night. We were thrown a little bit of a curveball, however, on Thursday when we heard that our leading outside hitter, Erik Brandsjö, had a fever and would not be able to play. We knew this series would not be easy and this was going to make things even more difficult.

Going in to the match, we could really feel the excitement in the town for something that hasn't happened in a long time. The last time Tierp Volley advanced past the first round of the playoffs was in 2005, when they ended up losing in the finals. We knew we were going to have great crowds for the rest of the playoffs and Thursday night didn't disappoint. Our little gym was packed half an hour before first serve and you could almost feel a sense of nervousness in the crowd. Apparently, even a couple of the women's team players couldn't sleep on Wednesday night. I slept like a baby, however. Nervousness has never really been a problem for me.

Anyways, the match started off really well for us, jumping out to early 8-4 and 16-14 leads but faltered late in the first set and ended up dropping the set 25-21. We made some minor adjustments going in to the second and they paid immediate dividends. We had leads of 8-5 and 16-12 at the technical timeouts and never looked back in a 25-18 win.

Set three was one of those perfect games for one team and an absolute nightmare for the other, luckily it was in our favor. I started out the third with a six point service run, which powered us to an 8-1 technical timeout lead. We also led 16-4 at the second timeout on our was to an easy 25-14 win and a 2-1 lead in the match.

The fourth set was a more typical set for us in this postseason. We really struggled early and had to battle back to get it done in four sets. We were down 16-12 but rallied to take a 21-19 lead and finish out the match with a 25-21 win.

It definitely wasn't a pretty volleyball match at any point, and was never even really that competitive, but we found a way to win it and that's all that matters. Eric Simon played great and led the way with 29 points, if he keeps playing this well and we have Erik Brandsjö healthy we're going to be tough to stop. We really are the most well rounded team left in the playoffs, we have five hitters that we can go to with the game on the line. I finished with four kills, three blocks and two aces. My serve really has become a game changer in the playoffs. I lead the postseason in aces by a wide margin. I have 15 and the next highest player has nine. Hopefully I can add to that total tomorrow in Falkenberg and we can steal the away win that we need.

Tomorrow's game will be broadcast but not on the normal site. Here's the link:

mms://streaming.streamteam.nu/Tierp

I'm not really sure how this link is going to work. When I clicked on it now, it opened in a video program called VLC Player, which you can download here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Also, I've been hearing that it's hard to follow the match since they don't show the score often. While watching the video, you can also open the livescore link in another window, here's the link for that: http://cupassist.com/pa/livescore/?nr=13333996

We push the clocks ahead here tomorrow, so match time is back at 10 AM Chicago time. Enjoy! Go Tierp!