Serbia's coach Nikola Grbic (left) wants his team to continue delivering this performance
Kraków, Poland, July 14, 2016 – Serbia opened their Final Six campaign with a four-set victory against Poland using their fresh strenghts and powerful serves to defeat the World Champions.
Stephane Antiga, coach of Poland: Congratulations to Serbia. They played very well. We had our opportunity like yesterday. Serbia play much better on serve than last year – you can see that they worked a lot. They made some aces, but we should receive better. They have got a high block and their game is really well-organized, not to mention that Serbia always had good attack. Now we are just waiting for the France vs. Serbia match.
Nikola Grbic, coach of Serbia: I am obviously very happy for how we played this game. I think if we continue to play like tonight, the results will come. The only small problem is to continue to play like this. Anyway, I think we approached the match very well. Then after the 10-minutes break, much like in Iran, we had a problem at the beginning of the third set, and we didn’t have the power nor concentration to come back in the game. I’m most happy about the good start of fourth set when Polish team changed some players and started playing very well and closed the gap to 9-8, but we didn’t lose our calm and continued our game.
Michał Kubiak, captain of Poland: Congratulations to Serbia, they played better than us. They deserved to win and all we can do is to wait for tomorrow’s results.
Marko Podrascanin, Serbia: I am really happy with this victory and the opening of the tournament. This is a really strange summer for us because we didn’t qualify for the Olympic Games so it’s our last tournament with the national team. We played a really good game, especially in the first two sets. Then Poland started to play more aggressively, especially on serve. In the fourth set we showed better and achieved an important victory. Now we need to forget about today, because ahead of us is the meaningful game against France. I hope we will continue our good play like today and tomorrow we will win again.
Srecko Lisinac, Serbia: It was a great match, Poland haven’t defeated us this year. From the beginning of this match we played really well and until the third set we didn’t have any problems. Then, we did few mistakes I guess due to this longer break, Poland started to serve much better and serve made a huge difference. In the third set Poland played great, but fortunately we were able to come back in the fourth set and now we are happy about booking a spot in the semifinal. We qualified for the semifinal, but it doesn’t mean anything – our coach and we want to win every match, so tomorrow we will play our best volleyball and we won’t suffer a lack of motivation, because each match against France is a huge event for us. France is a strong team, but we hope to beat them tomorrow.