Ali Thameem
The Maldives National Volleyball Team has bid farewell to the CAVA Volleyball Championship 2024 with back-to-back wins over Tajikistan.
In the ranking game played this evening, Maldives won the first two sets with 25-16 and 25-17, but Tajikistan narrowly claimed the third set with 23-25. Maldives claimed the fourth set with 25-22, winning the game.
Captain and outside hiiter Sajid Ismail played a key role in both today’s ranking game and yesterday’s final group-stage win against Tajikistan. In yesterday’s game, Sajid scored 27 kills from 55 attempts.
Despite the national team’s losses, Sajid outshone rival spikers, winning the top scorer of the championship. He scored a total of 110 points, which is 31% of the total points scored by Maldives.
Sajid is not the only national team player to receive an award this week. While representing the Maldives in Uzbekistan, Adam Naseem received the news that he just won Volleyball Athlete of the Year at the Maldives Sports Awards.
Maldives had started the championship with a string of losses against Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.
Both Afghanistan and Maldives scored one win against four losses. But Maldives lost the 4th position – and thus missing out on the battle for the bronze medal – due to to our South Asian rivals’ better win/lose ratio in across all sets (AFG 0.583, MDV 0.286).
The men’s championship marked the end of three CAVA tournaments, all of which Maldives had taken part in. The Cava women’s championship, held at home in Male’, saw the Woman’s National Team winning silver medal. CAVA U-20 championship took place in Colombo, with Maldives U-20 ending up in 6th place.
