“Outrageous” is how Taryn Kloth described it, and that word could have been applied to any number of matters on Sunday morning at the Espinho Elite16.
The six match points she and Kristen Nuss fended off in the second set of the gold-medal match in Portugal to Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli?
The sixth time in seven matches between those two teams that have gone the full three sets?
A third straight final made in the month of May alone?
The completion of an unlikely comeback in a 17-21, 28-26, 15-10 white-knuckler gold-medal win, in conditions that Kloth described as a “swirly tornado stadium wind storm”?
Outrageous, all of it.
“It’s always an outrageous battle against that Swiss team,” Kloth said. “The service pressure, defense and crazy hustle plays.”
When compared to the last time the two teams played, this one seems almost tame. That came in the ninth-place round of the Doha Elite16 earlier this year, a 21-23, 21-19, 23-25 Swiss win, a defensive clinic in which both teams sided out less than 50 percent.
Since, Huberli and Brunner have won their first Elite16 gold, in Tepic, and Nuss and Kloth have taken a silver in Brasilia and a second at AVP Huntington Beach, the field of which is deep enough on the women’s side to be comparable to an Elite. Both teams, in other words, arrived in Espinho in top form.
Nuss and Kloth picked off world No. 1 Ana Patricia and Duda for the first time of their careers in the quarterfinals, while Huberli and Brunner did the same to third-seeded Barbara and Carol in the first round of playoffs. It set the two, both of whom have arguments as the best defensive teams in the world, on a crash course for their seventh matchup.
Nuss and Kloth fended off eventual bronze medalists Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon of the Netherlands (22-20, 21-13) in the semifinals, while Huberli and Brunner took out Beach Pro Tour Finals silver medalists Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Muller in the quarters (21-19, 22-20) and Spanish Cinderellas Daniela Alvarez and Tania Moreno in the semifinals (21-12, 21-19).
That the two would play their longest match of the tournament in the finals was almost predictable. Of the seven matches they’ve played, five of them rank as the longest or second-longest match of the respective tournament in which they competed. What’s more, you can almost bet on…
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