18/06/2015 11:54
Elimination round starts with mixed fortunes for Azerbaijani teams
2015 European Games
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 18, 2015. The women’s competition at the Beach Arena resumed on Thursday late morning with the first set of matches on schedule for the elimination round. The home teams of Azerbaijan left the centre court of the majestic Beach Arena with mixed feelings as only one made it through to the next stage of the tournament after Raquel Goncalves Ferreira and Iuliia Karimova lost in straight sets (21-23, 19-21) to Diana Zolnercikova and Martina Jakubsova of the Czech Republic. Vivian Da Conceicão Cunha and Zinaida Liubymova, on the other hand, are through to the second elimination round following their 21-19, 21-13 win over Finland’s twins Erika and Emilia Nyström and will now take on Italy’s Laura Giombini and Giulia Toti for a spot in the quarterfinals.
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Last night Zinaida Liubymova and Vivian Cunha had lost their final match in the pool to Lithuania’s rising stars Monika Povilaityte and Ieva Dumbauskaite after dissipating a 12:7 lead in the tie-break: “It was heart breaking. For me it was just a nightmare. All the way home I was thinking on the bus all 40 minutes that this is going to be my nightmare for the next 10 years. It was really bad. We had a big lead. I don't even know how today I got focussed on the game, seriously. The whole night I was like 'how could I do that? How could I do that?' I have never had such a big lead in the third set to lose it,” she continues.
Back to today’s performance and the match with the Nyströms, Zinaida said: “It was a little bit windy - and I think we adjusted to the wind a little bit better than them. They couldn’t do their basic things, like serve. For me I had nothing to lose because the worst match of my life already happened. I was like I am going to do everything I can.”
Liubymova, who originally comes from Ukraine, has teamed up with Brazilian-born Cunha and therefore their partnership is somehow very unique: “It is a little bit hard to get used to their culture because they are fired up all the time, passionate. I try to keep myself calm because if I get like that I can go crazy and make more mistakes than I am used to. On the other hand I am trying to be loud but inside myself.”
“It’s very frustrating and very hard,” commented Raquel Goncalves Ferreira after losing to the Czech girls. “We worked really hard to get here and the matches we played both yesterday and today followed a similar pattern. Today they were keeping the serve in the court and trying not to make mistakes. We had the second set, we were ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead. And suddenly we got stuck in the rotation and lost five points in a row. It does happen often and this happened yesterday and today.”
“I was telling Iuliia, 'We're basically making straight mistakes, straight errors. It’s not like we are hitting balls and they are digging and earning the point. We were just hitting out, serving out, shanking the passes,' so this makes life really difficult. It was a swirling wind and from the four girls who were playing on the court, Iuliia has the least experience so all the time she was trying to check on wind and everything and the pressure was on her too. I tried helping but sometimes I tried too much and I forced some errors as well.”
“The next step is to rest for a while,” Raquel explains. “We have been in preparation since February and it is non-stop. I have not had one weekend off. Still when we have one day off, it is full of meetings, going here, going there, and travelling like crazy. So we need one or two weeks to just rest our minds. We are going to keep up with the physical work because you can’t lose it in the middle of the season like that. We are probably going to sit down and talk again and figure out where we are heading from now on. But all of our focus so far was towards these European Games.”
Other teams through to the second elimination round – where the first-placed tandems from pool play will be back in action – are Rimke Braakman/Jolien Sinnema of the Netherlands, Tina Graudina/Marta Ozolina of Latvia, Austria’s Katharina Schützenhöfer/Lena Plesiutschnig, Poland’s reigning U22 European champions Karolina Baran/Jagoda Gruszczynska, Russia’s Maria Prokopieva/Ekaterina Syrtseva and Spain’s Amaranta Fernandez Navarro/Ester Ribera Boter.
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