Kraków, Poland, July 15, 2016 – Brazil won their second game in Kraków, defeating USA in a tie-breaker 3-2 (24-26, 21-25, 28-26, 25-21). John Speraw’s team is now out of the tournament without a victory in Final Six.
Bernardo Rezende, coach of Brazil: We always learn when we play against USA. I think we learned when we played in their country last time. We didn’t have the opportunity to play in the World Cup, so we started the preparations in the US, where we began to build our team. We don’t have the talents that we had some years ago, but we have a great, hardworking team to play in the tournaments like World League or Olympics. It’s always a challenge to play against USA, the only way to win against them is to play as a complete team and you need to have deep reserves in tournaments like this.
John Speraw, coach of USA: Congratulations to coach Rezende. He built a very good and deep team. Today he reached for reserves and still delivered a great result. They are experienced and play with this enthusiasm. I think we played with more enthusiasm than yesterday, but we could not execute the actions at the level which we played earlier this summer. We need to regenerate and regroup before the Olympics. We need to analyse, train as far as we can and hopefully find the level at which we played in the past two summers.
Bruno Rezende, captain of Brazil: I think it was a really great match, both teams played on a good level. We are really happy because we knew that our strength is playing as a one team, 14 players. USA are a very strong team. We know what we’ve done and tomorrow we will have a really hard match. I think we need to play with the same enthusiasm like in the other group matches and the result will come.
David Lee, captain of USA: We are very sad about the result today. Now we are out of the tournament. Today was a better day than yesterday, we began with the enthusiasm and energy. In the third set we didn’t execute from the service line. I am very sad, because we should pass to the semifinals and this would help us on the way to the Olympics. I think we can learn a lot from these matches, but now we are eager to get back home, take a rest and get ready before the main tournament in Rio.
Felipe Fonteles, Brazil: I think the match was very tight from the beginning. The Americans played their maximum level because they needed victory 3-1 or 3-0 to stay in competition. But we never gave up. Bernardo thought that substitution in the third set was important. I tried to help especially that I was seeing from behind some deficits. I tried to help, the guys followed me and it was very good because we won. The spirit of the team is that we never give up.