The University of East London men’s first team played their second home game of the season thrashing Exeter in a game that lasted less than one hour at SportsDock last Wednesday 31st of October. UEL won the game by three straight sets.
Prior to the game the Blues went into the contest having played three games and wining two. They were looking to build on the champions title from last season by focusing to defend their title.
Exeter on the other hand were looking to get their second win of the season after an opening win against Bristol. Since their opening win, Exeter have only managed to win one set of the three games played this year.
Comfortable Start
The score in the first set was 25-13 with the east London team leading comfortably most of the way through and giving Exeter’s points from their mistakes. UEL’s lost points occurred mostly from missed serves.
Exeter looked disorganized, with little communication between them. Frequently two players were defending the same ball at the same time.
In the second set Exeter changed their game plan and began to put pressure on the UEL team, but Ian Legrand’s squad maintained their focus and in the end won the set comfortably by 25-12.
In the third and final set UEL opened a 10-point gap before Exeter managed to score a point. The blues took the third set in less than 15 minutes, scoring the majority of points by way of aces.
Disappointment
Speaking to the UEL men’s head coach Ian Legrand after the game, he was sympathetic to Exeter’s approach:
“Exeter have not travelled well in the last few years and I suspect they had a few players missing so it’ s not going to be a foregone conclusion when we travel up there.
“I was a bit disappointed that some of the things we worked on we didn’t really execute on and didn’t execute clinically as we wanted to. We wanted to give everyone some court time and some players didn’t take their opportunities. It was a difficult game to stay in it.”
Next Fixture
Coming up for UEL is the University of Bristol next Wednesday at Sports Dock. They will be looking on adding another win against them this season as they already won the opening game of the season 3-0.
