Reigning Olympic champions China did what they had to do in beating Poland in straight sets and advancing to 9-5 at the 2021 FIVB Women’s Volleyball Nations League in Rimini, Italy on Saturday.
China, resting their key player Zhu Ting in this match, survived a sturdy challenge from Poland to beat the European rivals in straight sets 26-24, 25-22, 25-16 to stay at the 5th place at the standings with 27 points from 9 wins against 5 losses.
However, as USA already had 14 wins, Brazil 12 and Turkey and Japan 11 apiece and with only one match remaining in the round-robin preliminaries, China are sure of missing the cut for the Final Four of the top-flight competition. Their last outing on Sunday is expected to be one of the most-watched clashes as they will go up against reigning two-time VNL champions USA.
Zhang Changning scored a match-high 21 points for China in their match against Poland on Saturday, while left-hander attacker Li Yingying added 18, Yuan Xinyue and Gong Xiangyu assisted with 12 and 11 points respectively. Marlyna Lukasik led Poland with 17 points and Magdalena Stysiak claimed 16.
Martyna Lukasik said at the virtual Mixed Zone: “China are a great team. They have lots of experienced and great players. We could have dug more balls – I think this element was difficult for us to dig their spikes. Maybe there were not too many mistakes on our side, but still we could have made less. But they are a great team and I’m happy that we could play against them. They showed us some good volleyball, so we need to watch the video from this match, analyse it and learn from this game.”
Zhang Changing said: “Our performance was very good. We supported each other as a team and all my teammates put their heart in this match and thus we managed to win. Our attack was key to this victory, we are getting better and better in this element.”
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