Okayama, Japan, September 1, 2015 – USA overcame Cuba 3-0 (25-15, 25-11, 25-15) on the eighth day of the FIVB World Cup at Momotaro Arena in Okayama on Tuesday.
USA coach Karch Kiraly: We had some goals today that were important for us in terms of our work at the service line and our block and defence coordination. After a bit of a slow start, I liked how aggressive we were able to play against a team, Cuba, that we have great respect for and a programme with a long history of success and a team that we know could be stronger but they have a very important player injured. She might play later this tournament but that made things a little easier for us today. For the eight matches so far, I think our team – all 14 of our players and all our staff – have been doing nice work. We know what we need to do and we’re executing our job, so that is good. We have some very difficult matches coming up. Our focus going forward is how to score the next point a lot against Russia. We know it will be a challenging weekend of opponents. There are lots of teams that are close but we can’t worry about them. The only thing we can think about is how to play as hard as we can and how to play smart volleyball for one point and then another point against Russia.
USA No. 21 Tetori Dixon: I think we played really well together; Cuba’s a really good team so it’s hard to play against them. We had to adjust a lot of things along the way but I think we played really well together. I think our coaches do a really good job of scouting teams ahead of time and we did a good job in practice of tidying up the block and I think our hard work showed today.
Cuba coach Roberto Garcia: Congratulations to USA for their win and we hope they can keep winning in the third round of matches. We have set goals for each player and in the first set I think we almost met all those goals, but in the second and third sets we had trouble with our reception and concentration, so we need to do more work on that. We had a warm welcome in Okayama, so we had a good time here.
Cuba captain Sulian Matienzo: Today we fought against USA, which is the top team in the world. Their block was great and that’s the reason we lost against them, but congratulations to them for their victory.