NVL Men Portsmouth (H) Match Report 2010-11

Portsmouth were the visitors for Tendring's first home fixture of the season. Having won the previous day, Portsmouth were in high spirits, ready for the challenge after a long journey. Tendring began with the same starting line up as the win against New Forest and with Sebastian Widlarz continuing his fine start to the season, Tendring began strongly.

Portsmouth could not keep up with the pace and power of Tendring in the early stages of the match. However, Portsmouth had a few tricky shots up their sleeve and deceived Tendring's defence on a few occasions, drawing the scores closer together. Tendring were a class apart, but despite their quality, failed to finish numerous chances and found themselves on level terms as the score reached the late teens. A run of serves from Stewart Dove took Tendring within touching distance of the first set. Spencer White-Overton made his first contribution to the season and came up with a great defensive play to set up Tendring's opportunity to win the set, which was duly put away by setter Nick Davies. Set score 25-20.

Between sets, coach Neil Masters highlighted a few areas of improvement and encouraged his team to dominate once again in their offence. Alex Porter started the set on fire shutting out Portsmouth attacks and converting his attacks into points to get Tendring off to a flying start. This was supported by Libero, Liam Chinnery with a fine defensive platform from which to attack the opposition. The young middle attackers Joe Cook and Sonny Chaney influenced the match more with some great blocking and effective attacking meant that often the other attackers had an easy chance to seal the points. Tendring running out with a comprehensive 25-13 set score.

Neil Masters made a change to the team in the 3rd set as Alex Porter is unavailable for the next fixture, but with Tendring on form Portsmouth crumbled under the pressure. Fine attacking plays, set up by Janice Porter man of the match award winner Nick Davies, proved Tendring utter dominance. In fact, only due to Tendring attempting a high risk serving strategy resulting in several serving errors, Portsmouth effectively won only 5 points on their own merit.
Tendring finished the match 25-13, taking them back to the top with a huge clash next weekend in Guilford.