Swiss Pool Play

So far so good here in Switzerland. It hasn't exactly been smooth sailing but the end result has been good for Phil and I.

In our first match we played Martin Laciga and Jefferson Bellaguarda. Bella, as he is known, is a former player from Brazil. He married a swiss women and after sitting out the past couple of years is now able to play for Switzerland. I actually played against Bella and Paulau in what seems like ages past. I remember he had great ball control, a great digger and had a cannon of an arm. Not much has changed. We pulled out game 1, 24-22. Battle the entire game. The second game I struggled to sideout as Bella was scooping and delivering on me. The third game was a battle too. We were ahead pretty much the entire time. At 11-10 us serving, there was a long rally and controversy ensued. Martin pushed one off of Phil that the ref called an open hand push. I didn't think it was an open hand push. However, Martin netted on his follow through which the down ref didn't call right away. I went over to the up ref and asked if he or the down ref had seen. He said the down ref did but he was calling the push. Wrong call but right result. That put us at 12-10 and they folded and we won 15-10.

In our second match on thursday we played Latvia for the second week in a row. They played better than they had in Stavanger but we won in two 21-17 and 18 to assure ourselves of getting out of pool.

Today we played our last pool play match vs. Estonia. This is a tough team to figure out. When they are playing well they are really good and then sometimes they can be terrible. They were good against us and we played a so so match. They beat us in game 1, 21-18. In the second they were up a bit when Phil went on a little serving run. One ace, a block, and an error later we were up by 2 points. We kept that until the end and won the second. In the third we were up pretty much the whole time. They kept getting a point here and there to make it close but then we would get it back. We won 15-12 to end up first in our pool and be done for the rest of the day. So we sit at 9th now and await the winner of a match to be determined this afternoon. There have been a lot of upsets here in Gstaad so there are a lot of tough draws out there.