I peel off my rain jacket and sit down to finally post our results from this tournament here in Portugal. As you may have guessed the reason I’m very late in writing this post is that I hate posting bad news. For those who haven’t already checked the FIVB website we finished 57th, losing our first round match in three to Japan (Morikawa-Hasegawa). Although we’d trained against this Japanese team twice before and were confident going into the game, intense winds and horizontal rain levelled the playing field somewhat. Unlike the windy conditions that helped us to a win in Croatia, the wind here was so strong that we struggled to even serve the ball in consistently with the wind in our faces. In the picture is the vielw of the wet, uninviting beach from our apartment balcony.

It was a close match, and after Japan taking the first 21-18 and us winning the second 21-15, we made a few too many side-out errors from the bad end (wind at our backs) to lose 11-15. A disappointing loss against a very beatable team, but at least we played well for parts of the match.

The cold, driving rain today is a bit of a repeat of qualification day, but on Thursday and Friday the sun came out; Espinho really is a beautiful place to play beach volleyball on sunny days. As for the rainy days, ‘V for Vendetta’ is  a great, fun movie well worth checking out, ‘The Guardian’ in my opinion, is not.

Next we plan to train with the Great Britain team in Bath, UK for a couple of days, before heading to Denmark for a National Tour event there. Following that we have only two more tournaments planned: a Challenger in the Czech Republic and our last FIVB Open in Montreal.