WHow horrible: Driving for hours on a bus through the night to a party where they probably won’t have much fun but where everyone else will have a great time. That’s how the players of VfB Friedrichshafen must have felt when they made their way to Berlin on Friday night after a bad defeat. If they lose to the Berlin Volleys for the third time in a row in the final series this Saturday (8 p.m.) in the Max Schmeling Hall, which is expected to be filled with 8,000 cheering spectators, the cup winners and defending champions from Berlin are German volleyball champions for the 13th time.
“We know: Anything is possible in sport,” said Friedrichshafen setter Dejan Vincic after the 0:3 (18:25, 11:25, 16:25) in front of a thousand spectators in his own hall. The experienced Slovene didn’t sound convincing, as head coach Mark Lebedew had replaced him and Argentinian winger Luciano Vicentin, usually a pillar of the team, with a score of 1:7 points in the downright disastrous second set on Friday evening.
“We were really good today”
In the defeat in the first final game on May 1st, the Friedrichshafener had taken a set from the Berliners in front of 7000 spectators. Anyone who took that as a sign that VfB would be able to do well at home was disappointed on Friday. The Berliners beat eleven aces; The outstanding setter Johannes Tille and middle blocker Anton Brehme each contributed three. The Japanese libero of Berlin, Satoshi Tsuiki, shone in the assumption that block and attack had improved significantly, as coach Cédric Énard had demanded.
In each of the three sets, the clearly superior Berliners quickly took the lead and had no trouble asserting themselves. “They didn’t have a lot of chances today,” Tille stated: “We didn’t let them get into the game.” Brehme commented on the one-sided game with the assumption that volleyball Germany would probably be happy if Friedrichshafen played at eye level with Berlin . “But we were really good today,” he concluded.
The Friedrichshafen head coach Lebedew was at a loss. “I don’t have an explanation for how the game went,” he said after the game: “We’ll go to Berlin now, prepare as best we can and fight for every point on Saturday.” It didn’t sound like he had hopes of giving the Berliners the party to be able to spoil.