Matsumoto, Japan, August 23, 2015 – Serbia stunned World No. 1 USA 3-2 (25-20, 22-25, 18-25, 25-19, 15-6) in the final game on the second day of the FIVB World Cup at Matsumoto City Gymnasium on Sunday.
USA coach Karch Kiraly: First, congratulations to Serbia. They played very well. We love to compete against them. They’re always a fierce team and one that presents challenges. We lost and this is a long tournament. This is only the second match with nine more to go so we will focus our efforts on the next opponent tomorrow. We played certain phases of our game well but I was particularly impressed with Serbia’s blocking and we didn’t make some very smart choices when they were putting up a block. I think we can make better ones tomorrow for sure. In terms of making player changes, we were looking for combinations that we thought would match up better against this team. Every night is a new challenge, every night is a new puzzle and every night there are new solutions to look for; that’s what we do.
USA captain Christa Dietzen: First of all, congratulations to Serbia on a great match. They’re always a fun team to play with their height and power, and we learned a lot from this match. It’s a long tournament and now it’s time to concentrate on China, so we’ll go home tonight and think about what we could have done better, but it’s on to what we have to do to defeat China tomorrow.
Serbia coach Zoran Terzic: What can I say? It was an amazing game, both interesting and high quality. We won and I must be very happy and satisfied. We played much better than the day before when we had ups and downs, but it was much better today and we stayed at the same level throughout the game. So I’m very, very happy and very satisfied with the victory.
Serbia captain Maja Ognjenovic: I’m very happy that we won today. It was a very tough match, as expected. We knew that USA were one of the favourites. Today was more or less similar to yesterday because we led 1-0 and then they equalised 1-1, but in the fourth set we had the power to get back into the game, and the fifth set was much easier than we expected. I’m so happy.