Photo by Tristan Tamayo/INQUIRER.net
For the nearly 4,000 people that watched the first game between Creamline and PayMaya in the championship round of the Premier Volleyball League Reinforced Conference, the match in front of their eyes was the first step in taking the title.
But for High Flyers head coach Roger Gorayeb, what he saw was a performance not worthy to even be in a championship conversation.
Although the set scores weren’t blowouts, the Cool Smashers handily beat the High Flyers, 25-21, 22-25, 25-20, 25-19, Sunday at Mall of Asia Arena.
And Gorayeb wasn’t shy in describing his team’s championship intensity, or the lack thereof.
“I can’t put into words what happened during the game,” said Gorayeb in Filipino as his team fell 0-1 in the best-of-three series. “The teamwork was gone, the passion was gone, the desire was gone.”
“It’s as if we went here to just play a volleyball, but not a championship game. It’s like we played in the eliminations that we can afford to lose because there will be 10 more games after this.”
Creamline held a 13-11 lead midway through the fourth set but that two-paint margin was just the precursor of an impending 9-2 Cool Smashers run that Alyssa Valdez capped off with a smooth kill for the 22-15 buffer.
And one of the two points that were put on PayMaya’s board during the run wasn’t the High Flyers’ own doing, as it was an error when Valdez overshot her spike.
“Alyssa didn’t play that well today but it was us who had the problem,” said Gorayeb. “The way we played today was as if this wasn’t a championship game, we played better in our previous games where we really fought.”
“This is our worst game, we had bad games before but this was the worst.”