Alison/Bruno Schmidt Win 8th-Straight World Tour Finals Match

  0 Braden Keith | September 16th, 2016 | News, Pro, Pro Beach

2016 FIVB BEACH VOLLEYBALL WORLD TOUR FINALS

Alison/Bruno Schmidt (Brazil) def. Virgen/Ontiveros (Mexico) 2-0

Starting play on the men’s side, the Brazilians Alison/Bruno Schmidt continued their perfect run at the FIVB World Tour Finals. Spanning back to last year’s inaugural tournament, the pair have now won 8-straight matches, which sandwich an Olympic gold medal in Rio a month ago.

Simply put, the pair are the world’s undipsuted best right now, despite admitting that they’ve taken a post-Olympic training break.

“Second match, second victory, so that’s a pretty good start,” Allison said. “We have a long tournament so we just need to keep up how we are playing, pretty focused.  We didn’t train as much for this event but we know how important it is to win this last one of the season.  We can’t let the mistakes get in control of the match, so we’ll take a rest and be even stronger tomorrow.”

Alison played his role at the net exceedingly well in the match – recording all 8 of team Brazil’s blocks. Bruno, meanwhile, led the pair in kills with 13 of the team’s 21 attack points.

Losiak/Kantor (Poland) def. Binstock/Schachter (Canada)

Poland, as a nation, continued their hot hand in the tournament, moving to 3-1 as a nation, including 2-0 for Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak.

The Poles played a fully-balanced match, scoring 6 attack points each in both sets.

While the Canadians held strong in the first match, it was a battle for the duration for them to stay in the match and push Poland to a 22nd point to clinch.

In set 2, Poland got up big early (leading by 12-7 and 16-11), and got aggressive late to finish off the match.

Samoilovs/Smedins (Latvia) def. Brouwer/Meeuwsen (Netherlands) 2-0

  • (21-19, 21-14)
  • Samoilovs/Smedins win Group B

The men’s side has shown much less parity than the women’s this week in Toronto, with this being the 7th-straight men’s game over two days to go 2-0.

This game had a very weird feel to it, as the Netherlands out-hit their Latvian opponents, but Latvia earned the victory in the service game. Latvia scored 7 aces to just 2 for the Netherlands, which coupled with 10 Dutch service errors to make the difference.

The Netherlands actually led 15-10 at one point in the first set.

“We managed to win the first set,” Smedins said post-match. “We were down about four points late but somehow we did it and we won.  The second set was easier than the first.  We’re lucky we are straight into the quarterfinals.  All the best players are here and we are trying to show our best.  The venue is perfect, the weather is great.  Yesterday was a free day and we went to Niagara Falls.”

As alluded to in his comments, the second set was more lopsided. Samoilovs and Smedins were up as much as 20-11 before sealing it 21-14.

Schalk/Saxton (Canada) def. Pedro/Evandro (Brazil) 2-1

In a match that was relatively meaningless (both teams would wind up in the round of 16 regardless of the outcome), the Canadians Chaim Schalk/Ben Saxton beat Brazilian #2s Pedro/Evandro 2-1.

The match was relatively clean, with most of the scoring coming on field attacks.

For the home-team Canadians, the younger Ben Saxton came up big – scoring 28 of the team’s 40 offensive points in the match. That included 23 kills across 3 sets.

 

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About Braden Keith

Braden Keith

Braden Keith is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of VolleyMob.com. Braden's first foray into sports journalism came in 2010, when he launched a swimming website called The Swimmers' Circle. Two years later, he joined SwimSwam.com as a co-founder. Long huge fans of volleyball, when Braden and the SwimSwam partners sought an opportunity to …

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