Alborg gets us again!

On Thursday, December 18th we played in the Pokal Cup semi final. As I've said there are 3 things we are trying to win, the league, the playoffs and the cup. The league and playoffs are pretty standard but the cup is a tournament that is played over the course of 4 months, so that the pre-quarters were in September, the quarters in October, semis in December and the finals will be the end of January. It is single elimination.
So our semi final match was in Alborg. The team we had beat two weeks prior at home in 5 sets. We took a fan bus with us and headed out towards Alborg which is usually about a 2 and a half hour drive. However, we did not count on two traffic jams to slow us up! Our match was scheduled for 730 and we arrived at the gym at 710. They pushed back the match to 745! gee thanks! Anyways we had a quick warm up and before the beginning of the game both teams left the gym and lined up in a tunnel. We had little kids lined up with us (like in soccer games) and they had a smoke machine when we ran out of the tunnel to flashing lights and an announcer. It was pretty cool, with so many fans there as well!
And that's about where the fun ended!!!
It was definitely not our day to play well. The first set was a pretty tight battle going back and forth, We were up 23-22 and then 3 hitting errors gave them the set 25-23. After that we lost a lot of momentum and lost the next two sets 25-19 and 25-16. Something was just missing from our offence. Mind you, they are a very big team that blocks well, but we seemed to be a little bit out of rhythm. So we have been eliminated from the Pokal Cup championship which is kinda disappointing as I believe it's on national TV.
Having to end the first half of the season on that note is kind of disappointing however especially over the past month we have improved greatly as a team. We knocked off the first and second place team in league and seem to be playing more in rhythm. Coming from playing with the same guys for 4 or 5 years you forget how long it has taken to grow comfortable until you're put in a situation where you need to get comfortable playing very quickly. I have only been playing with these players for 3 months now and we are definitely starting to play better. Hopefully in the second half of the season we can see the same kind of improvement. We still have two more goals to win in Denmark (league and playoffs) and one in Sweden (Nordic Championship) so we have lots of opportunities to play well.