VE U16 girls Grand Prix Tier 2, Round 1 Pool A

Woodchurch High School, !2 noon to 3:00pm

Oh dear! after a perfect start against weak Warrington and Newcastle Staffs B teams our girls fell apart in their final match against Newcastle Staffs A ending up in second place in this Grand Prix first round competition. 

Wirral vs Warrington - won 2-0, 25-8, 25-17

Wirral vs Newcastle Staffs B - won 2-0, 25-3, 25-16

Wirral vs Newcastle Staffs A - lost 0-2, 22-25, 22-25

We won the first match against Warrington, an obviously new and inexperienced team, with some ease, giving us the chance to get the whole sqaud involved with personel changes in the second set. The second match against Newcastle Staffs was in some ways even easier as Ella simply blew them off court serving 20 consecutive points in the first set almost all of them aces. The second set was closer but Wirral were clearly in a different class. 

So how to explain the collapse against Newcastle Staffs A? They weren’t much stronger than their B team although they did get around the court better, but our girls just fell apart. We had problems with service receive in the first set but even though our passing improved in the second set we were continually let down by unforced serving errors. Even at the end of the second set at 22-23 when we could still have won the match a feeble serve into the net was followed by a serve-receive error and the game was lost. 

This team is close to be very good, certainly good enough to win this national Tier 2 competition, but it wants a bit more confidence, both from the players in their indivual skills and in their trust in one another. We could still win the Grand Prix, we’ll have to see who we draw in the next round and whether we can keep the standard of perfomance up over three or foujr games.