The Lady Spikers will face the Lady Eagles in a familiar finals duel tomorrow, 3 pm at the Arena in San Juan. Last year, the ladies in Green-and-White beat the Lady Eagles, but tomorrow’s match may be a different story.
The Lady Spikers, the defending champion, is set to face the only unbeaten team this season. This season, the odds are stacked against DLSU since the squad is behind Ateneo in the win-loss record.
Offense versus defense
Ateneo’s wards have an edge over the Taft-based Spikers in the spikes department. So far, the Lady Eagles have tallied 45.67 spikes per game compared to La Salle’s 37.17 average.
Ateneo’s spiking advantage, however, might not bring the game to the Eagles for so long as the league leading blocker, the Lady Spikers, averaged 8.83 blocks per game. Ateneo has, so far, averaged 5.67 blocks per game.
In the end, the results of the match will boil down to each squad’s game plan.
A slight edge
While Ateneo has averaged almost 26 unforced errors per game, La Salle, on the average, committed 21.33 errors a game, giving the Lady Spikers an opportunity to capitalize on.
In terms of service aces, both squads are not apart. The Lady Spikers averaged 0.33 more than Ateneo’s 6.5 aces a game.
A matter of preparedness
Coming into the match, the Lady Spikers is a younger than the team’s counterpart on the floor. Since the squad’s five set defeat, the ladies from Taft won all their games in three sets for a total of 20 sets in the season compared to Ateneo’s 24 in six games.
A respondent in a poll made by The LaSallian commented, “While this might be a close fight, I think DLSU can take this match in 3 sets if only they can intimidate and dismantle their rivals early on. Though they lost to UST in 5 sets, they have won straight sets over NU, AdU and FEU something that ADMU struggled with.”
