When Filip John had put the final point behind 127 cup minutes against Düren on Saturday evening with his service ace, something that seemed a bit like a spontaneous theme party began in the Herrschinger Nikolaushalle at an advanced hour: many of the 650 spectators, who attended almost the entire After spending the fifth set standing in the stands or behind the field, they hugged each other, while the WWK Volleys Herrsching players did the same on the field, visibly exhausted.
Following the 3:2 (25:23, 21:25, 13:25, 27:25, 15:12), fans, players and club officials not only celebrated the Bundesliga volleyball players’ entry into the semi-finals of the DVV Cup, where… they have to compete away in Giesen. There was also a subsequent party on the occasion of head coach Thomas Ranner’s wedding, which he actually somehow managed to accommodate in the midst of the marathon of appointments over the past two weeks. The sporting gift from his team commanded respect from the 36-year-old. “I would almost go so far as to use the word pride,” he said, and gave his players a gift in return: Because the calendar exceptionally calls for a full week’s break before the next game, they were given two days off.
The changeable but highly entertaining game in the cup quarter-finals was Herrsching’s third game over five sets in the young season, but the first with a better ending for the hosts. “You could see it in some of the faces: everyone really wanted to do this, but they really couldn’t do it anymore,” said setter Eric Burggräf. For the 24-year-old it was the first encounter with his former club; Together with diagonal man John, Burggräf moved from Düren’s second row to Ammersee in the summer.
John was the team’s top scorer of the match with 21 points. Without diminishing his performance: The fact that Herrsching retained the upper hand despite a severe slump in the third half was mainly due to the fact that the Upper Bavarians put together a team that gave coach Ranner options for substitutions on match day. “The secret behind our high basic level at the moment is that the responsibility is spread across several shoulders,” said Ranner. In previous years, squads from Herrsching that were sewn on edge had certainly caused a sensation at certain points. The proverbial oscillation between genius and madness had repeatedly been their downfall in important games.
“The fact that the hall is immediately there in such moments is one of the plus points here,” says Ranner
Strong fluctuations were also observed against Düren. Receiving errors, in which the ball slipped between libero Leonard Graven and attacker Theo Timmermann while their hands almost touched each other while waiting for each other, alternated with powerful attacks from the second ball – brilliantly executed by the same Timmermann, among others. With such actions he achieved a respectable attack rate of almost 60 percent. Ranner attested to his Swedish colleague Daniel Gruvaeus: “He plays two and a half fantastic sentences – and not two.” Knowing that behind every player there is another waiting, “who might be doing it better,” it makes it “great to work because I can do something as a coach instead of just having two timeouts per set and no possibility of substitution.”
After two strong sets, Ranner was also in demand as a mental coach. At the beginning of the third round, his team lost focus, no longer brought any emotions to the field and no pressure behind their own actions. “We didn’t go any further,” said Gruvaeus, “but we came back because we remembered to do our job and give it our all.” Ranner was visibly pleased that “we didn’t go crazy at that point because we noticed that the others could do something too.” The fourth round that followed was “not brilliant” in terms of volleyball, “but we celebrated ourselves and our points again.”
The audience in the small, narrow venue did the rest. “The fact that the hall is immediately there in such moments is one of the plus points here,” said Ranner. The reason for the event being held in the St. Nicholas Hall was the guests’ international appointments. The BMW Park was not free on the remaining dates. Things will be different when it comes to revenge in the league in a week: Then Düren will be a guest at BMW Park. However, that doesn’t worry Gruvaeus: “We’ve already proven there that we can play volleyball well,” he said. It sounded a bit like a threat.
