Russia sweeps Spain in Pool E match of FIVB Men's Junior World Championship
The Maracanazinho Gymnasium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil saw the Russians compete with the Spanish on August 5th in the second round of the FIVB Men's Junior World Championship Pool E. The Russians ended up defeating the Spanish by 3-0.
The three set victory for the Russians was fairly one sided with the Spaniards falling short in each of the three sets. After losing the first set of the match, the game seemed to slacken a bit and the Spanish lost the second set as well. A two set deficit
enabled the Spanish to show some signs of life in the third set but the effort came in too late and the Russians bagged the match at the following final set scores: 25-20, 25-18 and 25-20.
Sergey Shlyapnikov, the Russian head coach, made the following comments at the press conference after his team had made a clean sweep: “We made several mistakes in the beginning and our blocking was not effective in the first set. From the second frame
on, our blocking improved and all components started working better and we managed to win.”
Francisco Hervas, the Spanish coach, expressed himself in the following manner: “Russia played a great match. They are an impressive team in the net. It was tough for us recovering from the defeat against Argentina in our last match in Niteroi But we still
have two matches ahead of us and we are going to think on them.”
The Russians started the first set by pushing ahead but the Spanish did not let them extend the advantage and took the lead at 10-9. It was after the second technical time out that the Russians were able to take back the lead at 17-16. The Spanish fell to
making errors later in the set which helped the Russians secure a win at 25-20.
The Russians got more comfortable in the second set and had the lead when the first technical time out was reached at 8-6 that they were able to extend to 17-14. As in the first set, the Spanish side again made errors that pushed the Russians towards another
win at 25-18.
The third set too started off with a Russian lead at 8-4 which got extended to 16-9. The Spanish could not overtake the Russians despite the fact that they tried to close in the gap. Therefore the third set ended with a score of 25-20 in favour of the Russians.
The top scorer was the Russian Andrey Kolesnik who was able to register 14 points in the entire match while the Spanish Francisco Ruiz was the highest scorer in his team at a tally of 13 points.
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