Alice Zeimann and Shaunna Polley will contest a bronze medal to finish their Commonwealth Games campaign in the women's beach volleyball after a titanic semifinal with Canada on Sunday morning.
Zeimann and Polley went down 2-1 [31-29, 21-14, 19-17] in a match that lasted 75 minutes - almost half of which belonged to the first set alone.
Canada looked set to claim the first set after finally breaking the deadlock at 15-all to push ahead to 19-15, but a comeback from the Kiwis saw the scores locked again at 20-20.
From there, the two sides slogged it out blow-for-blow for the next 11 minutes before a pair of errors from Canada allowed New Zealand to seal the first set 34 minutes after it had started.
It was the first set the Canadian duo of Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes had lost so far in Birmingham but they didn't let it sway their confidence as they came out firing in the second set to jump to an early 8-3 lead.
Despite some impressive scoring work from Zeimann, the Kiwi duo couldn't claw back the deficit and eventually went down 21-14.
That sent the match to a tiebreaker third set, meaning the first team to 15 would win the match unless they were locked in another tiebreaker, in which case a lead of two would be needed to decided the semi.
As fate would have it, another tight set of points traded back and forth unfolded leading to the scores being locked at 15-15 but Pavan and Humana-Paredes, falling back on their experience as defending champions from the Gold Coast, managed to eventually get the break point they needed and with it earned a shot at defending their title in the final.
For the Kiwis, it means they will now play Vanuatu in the bronze medal match while Canada and Australia contest the gold in an exact replay of the final from four years ago.
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