Tokyo, Japan, September 22, 2015 – Australia beat Tunisia 3-0 (25-19, 25-17, 25-19) in the FIVB Men’s World Cup at Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium on Tuesday.
Australia coach Roberto Santilli: Today, something really special happened: We won our second game in a row. It’s very unusual but now we’re going to try and win our third game in a row tomorrow, so that will be a big challenge for us. It gives you an image of how tough the first part of the tournament was for us and how much we can be happy now to have a competition where we can compete and control the game like we did today. The game today showed how we are improving how to play volleyball reducing the number of mistakes; this is one of our goals.
We beat Serbia and Italy in the World League, but the World League is different from the World Cup. We came here with a different attitude because this is a tournament where there are four teams playing to take the tickets for Rio and they are not joking here. They are not making any experiment. You can see Italy, Russia, USA and Poland not make any experiment. They just go straight because they want the ticket to Rio. For us to play against these teams in this moment with this kind of young team is something really different and that’s why I didn’t like to play against these teams sometimes. In this tournament, we have two different levels of teams and this makes a big difference how you can play and how you can perform.
Australia captain Thomas Edgar: Today, overall, I’m very happy with the way the team performed. It’s always difficult in long tournaments to stay focused. Every team and every person is physically and mentally tired. Especially after our tough round in Toyama, I’ve been really impressed and happy with how our team has played, especially in the last two rounds against Iran and Tunisia. I felt today we were in control of the match. Obviously, there are still areas we can improve on but overall I can’t be happier. A win in this tournament is always a great achievement and I’m looking forward to hopefully getting another big result tomorrow.
Tunisia coach Fathi Mkaouar: Tunisia played a five-set match yesterday and were very tired, so we weren’t able to play well today. Also, against Egypt we had hopes of winning the match but weren’t able to manage that and that brought us down mentally. So from the start of the match we didn’t have a good mentality. Australia is one of the strongest teams in Asia and it’s almost natural that they won today. All we could do was try and play our best. We tried to win but it wasn’t possible. Of course, the team is mentally and physically tired and we have to prepare as best we can, but not only for the last game tomorrow but also for the Olympic qualifiers, which are very important. So this competition was good experience for us as we have to prepare for those upcoming matches. Yes, we lost a lot of matches and made a lot of mistakes, but we learned a lot. Now we must work with the players and staff to put the team back together for our upcoming games.
(Re. absence of Moalla and Garci): The reason Moalla didn’t play was because he has been playing in almost every match so he’s physically tired and I wanted to give him a rest. But also I wanted to play Karamosli and give him a chance to show what he can do. As for Garci, he’s not been doing great physically so we have to consider the future and I didn’t want to take any risks.
Tunisia captain Marouen Garci: Australia is a very strong team and they played well, but we are a little tired and couldn’t perform so well, so I’m not surprised they won the match.