The 9th League day of the 2015 Wellington Handball League has seen the two Vikings teams coming up shot while playing good Handball.

At 5:00pm, the Vikings women team has faced the Spartanz team and showed again that they improving game by game. Unfortunately over half of the team were involved in the game before, playing as part of the U20 team the Vic Uni team, and therefore some early exhaustion symptoms played a key role in their performance.
The game started not the well and we were quickly behind with two goals (1:3, 2:4) but the girls fought there way back and equalized (4:4). Over the last 8 minutes of the first half we missed to many open shots and the Spartanz on the other side were able to convert theirs and therefore the 4:7 lead for the Spartanz at halftime was a fair result.
The second half started with a quick Vikings goal (5:7) but then the Spartanz pulled away and established a five goal lead (5:10). In this phase the Spartanz again benefited hugely from their great goalkeeper performance. But the game wasn’t over yet. After a timeout the Vikings girls mobilised the last energy reserves and closed the gap goal by goal up to a 8:10, and you could see the Spartanz started to feel the pressure. Unfortunately, a really lucky Spartanz goal (8:11) in that phase stopped the Vikings momentum and the Spartanz were able to close out the game with a final standing of 8:12.
The Viings women can be proud of their shown performance, taking in consideration that this was their second game for the day, the only weakness today was the inefficient conversion of too many great goal shot opportunities.
Clearly a focus moving forward will be shooting training and hopefully that will see our women team more often winning in the future.
Vikings women: Bridget (1st), Kirstie 2nd); Ellie 3, Fran 2, Bridget 1, Lizzie 1, Laura 1, Alex, Kirstie, Hannah

At 8:00pm, the Vikings men team, suited up against the undefeated League Leader Vic Uni. Over each of the two previous matches, you could see the Vikings getting better each match and so this game saw as well massive improvements.
From the game flow it was clear that this will be a close match all the way and certainly it was one of the better if not best match of this years Wellington Handball League so far. No team could really build a higher lead than two goals and the Vikings team often was ahead of Vic Uni. Both teams tried to play fast and certainly saw some nice fastbreak goals. As the Vikings new that this was one of the strength of the Vic Uni team, we certainly did not a good job on limiting them more as we did and that’s a cleat area we need to improve moving forward. Luckily the Vikings Goalie Petr had another strong game in which he took away a few open shots that kept the Vikings in the game.
On another side we have seen very good team play of the Vikings especially with the passing and sharing of the ball during the game. We’ve seen a few stretches of brilliant team Handball and certainly that’s what we are aiming to play consistently for 60 minutes.
Another outstanding performance was seen by our defense, Vic Uni has a really good team which plays together for quiet some time now and we were able to restrict their pivot game extensively while not allowing too much from the back positions either, and that was a clear improvement to previous games.
All together the Vikings men lost in a heart breaking final 30:31, but we definitely played the game the right way and improved further. Taking in consideration the many open shots we missed again, the 3-4 fumbles at fast breaks that were unnecessary and the concentration lapses in our fastbreak defense, I think we were very close to winning the game. Congratulations to the Vic Uni team to the win of a great game though, but be warned we will try again and again.
Vikings men: Petr; Todd 7, Luke 7/2, Nico 6, Daniel 4/1, Jack 2, Antonino 2, Pierre 1, Ben 1, Emmanuel, Sam K