John Speraw congratulated Serbia as they are "a great team" which USA had to defeat to stay alive
Curitiba, Brazil, July 5, 2017 - USA coach John Speraw was full of compliments for his players as they pulled out a well-deserved win over Serbia to reach 2017 FIVB Volleyball World League semifinals in Curitiba, and also because he stressed that “Serbia is a great team.”
John Speraw, USA coach: “It’s always interesting to see how your team is going to respond after you have a disappointing loss like the one yesterday, so I’m most pleased with how we came onto the match, how we won the first two sets and how we held on when Serbia did a nice run. Third set they served really well and they were ahead on the fourth, so I’m really proud of the guys for how they responded there. Serbia is a great team, so this is a great win for us and for this team to be in the semifinals is amazing.”
Kawika Shoji, USA captain: “We’re very excited by this victory and the qualification to the semifinals. We have a lot of respect for Serbia, so we prepared really well for the match. Maybe we had a little advantage because we had already played on this court, and well, we just had to win. We had a lot of motivation and we had to play on back-to-back nights, so to finish that strongly on the fourth set is impressive. I’m proud of our guys.”
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Nikola Grbic, Serbia coach: “USA played very well and deserved to win. They took a lot of risks on the service and they resolved the first two sets with that. On the other hand, we didn’t play our best match. We didn’t play bad though, but we could have played some situations a little bit better. But this is what I told the guys - two years ago in Brazil, we lost the first match against Italy and then had to win against Poland, world champions at the time, and we did it. We lost tonight but we have a chance tomorrow, so concentration and focus will be vital.”
Nemanja Petric, Serbia captain: “First of all, congratulations to USA as they played very well tonight. On our side, for sure it wasn’t our best game. I think reception made the difference at the match, and their great young players did the job. We know we still have a lot of chances tomorrow and I hope to play better because we know we can do it.”