With Friends in Molde (EUWRL)
Last weekend we had the pleasure to travel to the place, where the dominating champions of almost every Underwater Rugby game and tournament come from – MOLDE was the place to be for playing and watching highest level Underwater Rugby.
Due to different circumstances the team from UWRC Wien was a great mixture of good players from all over the world. We were 1 girl(!) and 4 guys from Vienna, 3 guys from Graz, 3 guys from Firenze, 1 guy from Germany and 1 guy from Colombia. We held our team meetings in two languages, tried to find the best line-up and were motivated to face two very strong teams from Denmark (Flipper) and Turkey (Ege UWR).
Our plan for the first game against Flipper, to play defensive, try to keep the ball in our team and only attack on fast counterattacks, was destroyed by our opponents, scoring a fast goal right at the beginning of the match. Though our Trainer Uwe Wiesner could identify and tell us our main fault immediately, we couldn´t arrange to implement his orders and so we got another 3 goals in a pretty similar way within a few minutes.
During half time we agreed to try to avoid these mistakes and focused on giving our opponents a harder time in the second half. Some people say Flipper wasn´t that motivated anymore, because they had lost their first game and were sure to win now with the 4:0 lead – in fact, Fabio Neri swam a very fast counter attack after several minutes and scored a wonderful goal! Suddenly we had the feeling that more could be possible, because Flipper got a 2min penalty and we managed to stay near their goal for a longer time. Unfortunately we missed to score, when we stole their basked and got stuck in some fights. When Flipper came back with six guys in the water, they immediately seized the game again and scored another two goals. 6:1 for Flipper – could have gone better, but not that bad at all.
On Sunday morning we had our team meeting right before the match against Ege UWR. We knew that Ege plays hard and fast so we agreed that everyone of us must take more responsibility to play less muted. Therefore everyone could tell his point of view of how we should arrange that game. We now realized, that we had different strategies within our team – we agreed in showing more passion helping each other and taking more responsibility.
In succession we met Ege UWR with new trust, but got paralyzed immediately. Every one of us was playing as he thought we all should do, but in fact, we had like 5 different strategies in the water. Every player had the feeling of being left alone by his teammates. We had no structure and no control over the next 30 minutes. The fact, that number 3 scored most of the 10 goals Ege gained in that game, shows, that none of us could read their game or react in the right way. We could clearly see, that only as one unit you may be able to challenge such a good team. Ege UWR played fast, hard and merciless. In my personal opinion, you could see a little Nordic handwriting – Iver must have given them some good hints ;-).
Summarizing we have to accept the superiority of the teams we played till now, they are all making bigger steps than we do.
We would like to thank Luca, Fabio, Gabriele, Torsten and Juan for not letting us completely alone and playing that well!
And many thanks to Jon Reidar Heggdal for a perfect organization and the Russian crew for a superb livestream!
SEE YOU IN COPENHAGEN!
