Well I hope some of you managed to catch some of the live stream last night.
Some incredible performances from both “underdogs”, with Chinese Taipei holding Netherlands to less than 30 goals for the match and only 11 goals at half time. The Dutch were always ahead, but they were truly challenged for the first time by a non-Belgian side. The ran out easy victors 27-17
Then Catalonia came out to stun the Belgians in the first half, leading 11-9 at half time! Disappointingly however, the second half was a completely different story. The Belgians slammed on 17 goals to 3 to take the match easily 27-14.
Before the streaming started, England played Portugal and after looking completely beaten early on, Portugal leading 7-1 after 10 minutes , they pegged back the deficit to be 3 goals down at 16 minutes, but then lost all their gains to be 6 goals down at Half Time, 17-11.
It took 15 minutes in the second half for England to again peg back the deficit to draw level and then take a single goal lead with 10 minutes remaining. Scores were levelled at the 58th minute, then the online scoring system crashed and failed to update for 10 minutes! In the meantime, Regular time elapsed with the scores 23 apiece and the match went into the tournament’s first Golden Goal.
England drew a Penalty shot after 5 minutes of play and the Portuguese heads all dropped as they resigned themselves to the loss ahead of time as England veteran Dave Brooks failed to convert! That lack of spirit might have cost the Portuguese the match as they were unprepared for Dave to quickly rebound his failed attempt and drop it to an unguarded Neala, running in from outside who successfully converted the run-in to seal the win.
Finally, in the first match of the day, Russia upset the Czech team in a dazzling display of Korfball (apart from the Penalty spot where 5 shots were missed collectively), the scores always very close throughout. The Russians took a 2 goal lead inside the final 10 minutes and the Czechs were never able to recover the gap.
There’s a treasure trove of videos to be found here (page automatically translated by Microsoft’s “Bing” Translator and probably only properly visible in Internet Explorer as all the Chinese websites seem to be)
And hopefully (although there’s been no announcement), there will be streaming of all of today’s matches including the Australia match starting 8:30pm Adelaide time.
If it is happening, plug this address into Windows Media player’s Open URL dialogue box, or just click the link below.