Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 14, 2017 – Unstoppable Slovenia demolished Thailand 4-0 (15-8, 16-14, 15-10, 15-10) in 56 minutes before an ecstatic home crowd here on Thursday at Arena Stozice to claim the first of the four semifinals tickets at the 2017 FIVB Women’s U23 World Championship with a day to spare in pool play.
The result secures top place in Pool A for Slovenia, but they still need to wait until the end of pool play on Friday to find out their opponent in Saturday’s semifinal at Arena Stozice.
The hosts survived a bit of a scare in the second, but cancelled three Thai set points in their 5-0 run to come back.
All matches in Ljubljana are played under a new scoring system currently being tested: a best-of-seven, 15-point set format.
Mddle blocker Tina Grudina and amazingly setter Eva Mori each bagged 10 points to top the match scorers table, though there was very well spread out across the whole Slovenia squad.
Slovenia outside hitter, Lana Scuka: “Thailand play differently than what we are used to. We had to adapt on that and it took some time to do it. They serve well, and we had some problems, but we showed what are we capable of and won. We are all very happy that we will play in semifinal.”
Slovenia coach, Alessandro Chiappini: “Today’s match wasn’t easy, as we are not use to playing against this kind of opponent. We still did a good job today, and we used our service well. In some moments we made some mistakes. We must correct that. But thank God our players managed to come back in the second set and stayed focused in the most critical moments of the match.”
Thailand coach, Chamnan Dokmai: “We did well in the reception, defence and service. But during the match some players lost concentration. Against such a strong team as Slovenia you have to play perfect – and we just couldn’t do that today.”
Thailand captain, Boonlert Tichais: “I am very happy that we had a lot of fans on the tribunes today. But I am not happy with the result. We lost too many points because of the mistakes and that was our problem today.”
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