Nagano, Japan, October 6, 2019 - Canada earned back-to-back victories at the 2019 FIVB Volleyball Men’s World Cup on Sunday, recovering from one set down to defeat Australia 3-1 (18-25, 28-26, 25-20, 25-22) at Nagano White Ring arena.
Canada coach Daniel Lewis: “For us this was a very important win, because it can get discouraging and frustrating if you don’t put some wins on the board for the more experienced guys. Tonight, we were not ready in the first set, I don’t think I prepared the guys well enough and we were overwhelmed. We were able to make some adjustments. It helped that (Australia’s Nehemiah) Mote didn’t stay in the game because he’s just coming back – we didn’t have solutions for him so that could have been a big factor. But I would like to say that our young and old players today did fight well. We started to work a lot on block defence. We were hurting ourselves a little bit with too many errors on the net, maybe the guys are starting to feel the fatigue or maybe being a bit too aggressive. But we’ve been focusing a lot on block defending and getting a little bit better in transition. Some outstanding play by our young players and our leaders today, so we’re going to build on this for next week.
“Potentially I think we could have had one more win – well, I guess you could always have more wins, but one that maybe we let go – and if we keep building on our success this year I think we can probably get a couple more wins in the final stage. I’m excited to go to the next city with the team and try to build from here. It will be difficult to manage the fatigue for everybody, for sure, and we’ll do our best to make sure everyone’s contributing.”
Canada captain Nicholas Hoag: “We’re quite satisfied with another win. I think we played pretty good block defence today, which is usually something that’s very important for us, especially the blocking phase. We dug a lot of balls and I think we started managing serves in the third and fourth sets – even when they maybe weren’t the most powerful serves, we put them in the right spots, and we put Australia in a difficult position to hit. I think we need to be more disciplined on small mistakes like net touches. I think we had nine or 10 today, and that’s way, way too many in any game of three or four sets. Finishing the first phase of the tournament we’re happy to have got a second win out of five games. After battling the first three games and then winning the fourth one we’re really happy with this win. We’ll keep going. We’ll play Tunisia next so we’ll start focusing on that.”
Australia coach Mark Lebedew: “Congratulations to Canada, they played a great match today. It’s a disappointing performance for us because it’s the fourth one that we’ve had like this in this tournament, and the 50th one in recent years where we’re not prepared to be active in the game – we wait for the other team to do things. And when you let good teams play and see what they do then it turns out that they will beat you every single time. At some point we have to learn this lesson, otherwise you might as well stop playing. And maybe today’s the day that we’ll learn this lesson.
“We had chances to win four from five matches and we won one, so this is how I feel about the first round. I feel that I have really enjoyed being in Nagano, the stadium is very beautiful, the crowds are very supportive, the organisation is perfect, but we lost three games that we should win.”
Australia captain Max Staples: “It’s a close game and it just comes down to a few balls where we can’t kill it. We got blocked out a few times and made a few hitting errors. We have good looks and just weren’t able to put the ball away when we should. There are some things in the game that are happening, maybe there’s a bit of a tendency that we don’t get on top of straight away. But we have all the chances, all the opportunities to make points inside out and in break point, but in the crucial moment we’re missing a bit.
“If we’re two percent better at everything then that’s enough. It’s not one particular thing – it’s a missed cover ball here, a spiking error there, maybe the wrong option in block – it’s not a single thing we’re doing poorly, it’s just a little bit lacking in a couple of areas.”