06/06/2014 12:20
Two former European champions to cross their ways in the 1/4 finals
2014 CEV Beach Volleyball European Championship - Final
Cagliari, Italy, June 6, 2014. Friday wasn’t a happy day for twins in Cagliari. After Paolo and Matteo Ingrosso lost their first round match to Austria’s Tobias Winter and Lorenz Petutschnig, another couple of twins – Finland’s Erika and Emilia Nyström – were eliminated from the women’s competition, this time in the second stage of the knock-out phase. The Nyströms had topped the charts of their Pool but on Friday morning could not stop the march of local heroines Marta Menegatti and Viktoria Orsi Toth who powered to a 21-15, 21-17 win to claim a spot in the 1/4 finals and play there the “orange” duo composed by Madelein Meppelink and Marleen van Iersel (pictured).
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The 1/4 final match coming up later on Friday afternoon on the white sand of Poetto beach will feature two former European champions, since Menegatti won the title in 2011 with former partner Greta Cicolari and Marleen van Iersel was crowned “queen of the beach” one year later in The Hague together with Sanne Keizer. Meppelink and van Iersel – who are playing together for the first season – stamped a terrific 21-15, 21-15 victory over second-seeded Katrin Holtwick and Ilka Semmler of Germany to make the 1/4 finals, the only Dutch team to achieve this feat in the tournament. “It was a very good match, everything went well and now we hope to repeat that same performance also when we play Menegatti and Orsi Toth in the next round,” Meppelink said. “We played these girls already on the World Tour this year and they will want to get their revenge since the last time they were leading by five points but we came back and won the match in the end.”
The crowd on the centre court got something to cheer about as Menegatti and Orsi Toth edged past the Nyström twins with a superb performance whereby they achieved their minimum goal in this tournament, i.e. a 5th place. They actually caught a relatively slow start trailing 10:12 in the first set but after taking a time-out, they pulled out an 11-3 run that propelled their 21-15 set win. The second set followed a similar plot with the Nyströms playing their best early on (8:6, 10:9) but after Menegatti and Orsi Toth levelled the score at 11, everything went quite easy for the “Azzurre” who pocketed also the second set (21-17) to make the 1/4 finals. Orsi Toth killed a series of blocks in this match, and she is given much credit for this victory also by her partner Menegatti. “She has been playing really well since the start of the tournament and today she did a great job at the net. We changed our pace after the time-out we asked in the first set; we talked to each other and said that it was time to change gear and accelerate the rhythm of the game. We succeeded in doing so and I am very happy with the victory and the result. Now we play the girls from the Netherlands and we definitely want to avenge our defeat from the Shanghai Grand Slam. It was mainly our fault that we lost that match in China, so today we want to enter the match very focused and determined and make the semis. We have achieved our minimum goal in this tournament, but now we absolutely want a spot in the semis,” Menegatti said.
Two more teams qualified for the 1/4 finals during Friday’s first session, namely Spain’s Liliana Fernandez Steiner and Elsa Baquerizo and Germany’s Victoria Bieneck and Julia Grossner. Last year’s silver medallists Liliana/Baquerizo beat Russia’s Alexandra Moiseeva/Ekaterina Syrtseva 23-21, 21-14, and in the next round will play the winners of this year’s FIVB Anapa Open, Bieneck and Grossner, who did not lose composure after missing out on a couple of match balls in the second set of their second-round feature with Isabelle Forrer and Anouk Vergé-Dépré of Switzerland. They regrouped and showed a superb performance in the tie-break to seal a 2:1 victory (21-15, 23-25, 15-4) and make it among the top 8 teams in Europe.
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