Posted by I haven’t been able to follow the matches too closely, but hopefully they will pop up on volleyballtorrents.com in the next few days.
In Russia, Lloy Ball and Clay Stanley’s team, Zenit Kazan, has dominated Dynamo Moscow, winning two home matches 3-0. This is a bit of a surprise, because although Kazan finished top of the league, Dynamo played a very strong second half of the season after being out of the playoffs for a period earlier in the season. Perhaps they are already thinking that their best hope of winning something this season will be next weekend’s rescheduled Champions League Final Four. Stanley has been the dominant figure in the series so far, top scoring in both matches with a total of 8 aces so far. The stats for the matches are here and here.
The Train Series (Lokomotiv Belgorod v Lokomotiv Novisibirsk) is much more evenly matched. After two five set matches the series stands at 1-1. Novisibirsk won the first match on the back of 9!! block points from American David Lee, but Belgorod bounced back the next day to even it up. The stats for the first match are here and the second match should be here.
The Greek semi finals have taken a bit of a turn. Apparently karma isn’t really a bitch after all and Aris pulled out a shock 5 set win in the second match against Panathinaikos. Inspired by captain Roumeliotis’ remarkable powers of recovery and his 28 points, Aris levelled the series at 1-1. In the other semi, Lamia used their home court advantage to push Olympiakos to five sets, but apparently Miljkovic didn’t want to lose and scored 33 points himself (64% attack, 2 aces, 4 blocks). Match reports (in Greek) are, presumably here and here. It all could be in vain though, as Iraklis are still protesting the court decision from the quarter finals, and the league are only playing the semi finals provisionally!! If the court ends up finding in Iraklis’ favour, the semi finals will start again from scratch.
It also might be interesting to see that the site of the Greek League has a weekly ‘Plays of the Week’ clip.
At Home On The Court 