Tournament favorite USA and the Philippines

Getting up early - no problem. We had plenty of time to recover.

5:30am Wake up, 6:30am Breakfast, 7:30am Departure. I already took care of most of the players between breakfast and departure in the morning. So let's go to the fields!

First, we played against the undefeated tournament favorites, the USA, at 9am local time. They are the reigning world champions and ranked 1st in the world seeding! But that's no reason for us to hide.

The game started great for us as we took a 1-0 lead and almost scored the 2-0. Unfortunately, a small mistake happened and the USA immediately punished us. After the USA took a 3-1 lead, we called our first timeout, discussed shortly, and fought back to make it 4-4. Then the USA stepped up the pace and went into halftime with an 8-4 lead.

In the second half, the USA increased their pace even more and used their tremendous athleticism. They pulled away from us with a score of 10-4.

Timeout! We couldn't continue like this. They are strong, but we can keep up with them. After all, we trained for 1 year for this. We showed that we can do it differently, prevented the USA from scoring 5 times, and scored ourselves to make it 6-11. The USA took a small moment during the next throw and extended their lead to 14-6. But the game is not over until 15 points are scored!

We stepped it up even more and pushed the USA to their limits, scoring 3 points in a row.

The USA wanted to end the game, which we could defend twice, but we missed out on scoring ourselves. In the end, the USA sealed the deal and won the match 15-9.

So far, we have achieved the highest score against the USA.

After that, we moved to the next field where we played against the women's team from the Philippines at 1pm.

That was absolutely not a nice match! The wind changed to a very strong wind, making playing almost impossible.

After 55 minutes (half time based on time), the score was 6-3.

The wind made it absolutely impossible to throw accurate passes forward. After 110 minutes, the score was 13-3 in our favor, and the game was ended by the time.

It's a shame that we couldn't play a real game here, but we're still in the race for the top 4.

After the game, we went back to the hotel. The agenda included resting, showering, treatment, eating, meeting, and sleeping.

Tomorrow we'll start early again, facing the teams from England and Singapore.