TWO days after Bryan Bagunas’ back-to-back title romp in Taiwan, it was Marck Espejo’s turn to win a championship in the Korean V-League after Incheon Korean Air Jumbos swept Ansan OKman in the best-of-five championship series on Tuesday in Ansan, South Korea.
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Incheon has now won its fourth straight V-League championship and fifth overall.
Espejo & Co. had to go the distance in Game Three of the title series after winning the first two games in four and three sets, respectively. But in the end, the Jumbos won a thrilling 27-25, 16-25, 21-25, 25-20, 15-13 five-set contest to complete the sweep.
READ: Bryan Bagunas wins back-to-back league championships in Taiwan
It was also Incheon’s fourth season in succession in which they topped the 36-game regular season prior to clinching the league title in an unbeaten five-game playoff run.
This year, the five-time champs finished the prelims as joint league leaders with Seoul Woori Card WON with a 23-13 (win-loss) card but was able to secure the top seed by virtue of points (71 to 70).
Albeit playing limited minutes in his first year with Incheon, Espejo now has a V-League crown to his name after his historic selection in the 2023 KOVO Men's Asian Quota Draft where he was then assigned to represent the Jumbos.
Korea marked Espejo’s third overseas league (fourth stint) after previously playing for Japan’s Oita Miyoshi Weisse Adler in 2018 to 2019 where Bagunas also played and FC Tokyo from 2021 to 2022.
In between his two stints in the Japanese league were a pair of one-year domestic league campaigns with Thai club Visakha (2019 to 2020) and Bahraini club Bani Jamra (2020 to 2021).
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