Tendring 3 - 0 Canterybury City

25-20, 25-23, 25-20

Report by Ryan Everett and Alex Porter

Tendring Make the National Shield Quarter-Finals

 

Tendring faced the unknown Canterbury City this weekend in the National Shield 2nd Round. Canterbury City are a non-league team but that doesn’t always mean it will be an easy win.

The game started with both teams trying to find each others weaknesses, Tendring had an advantage in this as two of Canterbury’s players were former Tendring players. For the 3rd game in a row Tendring’s line up again had to be altered due to injuries, today it was Chinnery, Dove, Cook, Overton-White, Widlarz, Davies and Masters as Libero. At 12-11 Tendring pulled away gaining a 3 point lead which Davies and Widlarz help maintain and extend until Tendring won the set 25-20.

The second set saw Cook and Overton-White start to relax and attack through the middle. Canterbury City performed some amazing defence to keep themselves in the game, diving into the spectators at one point. This gave them some confidence, at 18-13 to Tendring Canterbury upped their game and suddenly it was 18-18. Tendring called a Time-Out to try and regain their composure but at 18-23 down, Coach Porter brought himself on to block for Chinnery. Canterbury City tried to play clever and hit away from Porter but Widlarz and Cook stopped them in their tracks. Porter then put some pressure on the Canterbury passing unit which made life easy for Cook, Davies and Widlarz picking up easy points on their blocks. Tendring pulled the set back to win 25-23.

Canterbury we first out of the blocks in the third set, at 6-10 up they looked like they had zapped all of Tendring’s confidence. Although Masters passing started to give Chinnery a number of options in attack, the attackers wasn’t converting their chances into points. Tendring kept pulling the lead back but Canterbury managed to get the edge again. Masters brought Porter back on for Chinnery to boost the blocking profile, which tipped the game in Tendring’s favour. Dove and Widlarz’s game came alight as they only had to hit against one man block. Tendring won the game with a block by Cook.

Janice Porter Award: Joe Cook