No matter what anyone says, the center of Heungkuk Life Insurance, a women’s professional volleyball team, is Kim Yeon-kyung (35), the ‘Volleyball Empress’. Inside the game, he is an offensive and defensive player who is good at both attacking and defending, and outside of the game, he is an irreplaceable player who enhances the team atmosphere with his unique fighting spirit and ceremony. Of course, due to Kim Yeon-kyung’s enthusiastic fandom, the away teams playing at Samsan World Gymnasium in Incheon need to have the mentality to overcome the shouts of more than 5,000 people.
So, in the first leg of the 2022-2023 V-League Women’s Champions Championship held on the 29th, the road construction manager Kim Jong-min’s solution to Heungkuk Life Insurance was ‘tie Kim Yeon-kyung’. The fact that he can’t do his part in the attack is because it has more than just one player’s sluggish performance. In order to block Kim Yeon-kyung, coach Kim positioned Catbell, who is the tallest in the team at 188cm, as an apologetic spiker. This is because if Kim Yeon-kyung and her rotation match, even if she is Kim Yeon-kyung of the world, she cannot help but be aware of the catbell’s blocking height.
Director Kim’s ‘Kim Yeon-kyung blockade’ clearly worked in the 1st and 2nd sets. It may be because Heungkuk Life Insurance players did not improve their performance because they had no practical experience for about 10 days after the last regular league match against Hyundai E&C on the 19th, but Kim Yeon-kyung scored 5 points, including 1 block and 1 sub score in the first set. , the attack success rate dropped to 25%. In the second set, she scored only 2 points, and her attack success rate dropped further to 20%. In the first and second sets, Kim Yeon-kyung scored 7 points and the attack success rate was only 23.53%, which means that the road construction players did not easily give Kim Yeon-kyung a goal. 스포츠토토
The problem is that the deterioration of the players’ condition was greater than the degree of deterioration of Heungkuk Life’s performance. Before the match, coach Kim said, “Maybe it’s the changing season, so there are some players who are a bit cold. That’s the part I’m worried about,” he said. It can be a common ‘smoke operation’ arranged by the command towers before the game, and if you have a real cold, there are many cases where the game works out rather well because unnecessary power is not put into the body.
However, when I opened the lid, the cold energy seemed to hit the entire road construction team. In the end, even after blocking Kim Yeon-kyung like that, the match on this day was twisted as they gave up all the first and second sets due to their poor condition. Park Jung-ah and Bae Yoo-na, the main players of the team, could not show half of the performance they showed in the last playoff against Hyundai E&C, and even the defensive nucleus Im Myung-ok made double contact mistakes, allowing an ace to the opponent’s easy serve, etc. It was definitely different from the good times.
Moreover, the scary thing about Heungkuk Life Insurance is that even if the team’s ace, Kim Yeon-kyung, is shaken, Yelena and Kim Mi-yeon are players who can explode. Setter Lee Won-jeong, who was absent due to an injury at the end of the regular season, returned in time for the championship match, and when Kim Yeon-kyung faltered in the 1st and 2nd sets, the team attacked Yelena. In the first set, Yelena’s attack share was 37.5%, and in the second set, it rose to 44.1%. Despite the increased possession, Yelena’s offensive power did not waver. With an attack success rate of over 50% in both sets 1 and 2, Yelena led the team’s attack by raising 10 points each in the 1st and 2nd sets, for a total of 20 points.