Qatar's Ahmed & Julio zoom into quarters of Qinzhou Open
QINZHO, China, October 14, 2017- Qatar's beach volleyball team comprising Julio Cesar do Nascimento Junior and Ahmed Tijan came up with a superb display of their combined effort defeating the Serbian pair in straight sets on Friday to make the quarter-finals of Qinzhou Open (a part of the 2017 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour) on Friday.
In what was a thrilling 16-minute encounter in windy conditions, the Qatar duo worked their way with force and guile to upstage the Serbian duo of Djordje Klasnic and Lazar Kolaric 21-14, 15-21, 15-7.
The Qatar players were delighted with their effort."It was a good game despite very strong winds. We fought hard and we are happy to have won," said Ahmed soon after the match.
Senior partner Julio said the two are now producing better results thanks to their understanding."This is our second season together. Now, he's (Ahmed) much better than we got together. The balance between us is almost perfect. We have more power and more experience together now. Hopefully we will do better ahead as well," he said.
The result, however, wasn't so fruitful for Qatar's more seasoned pair of Cherif Younousse and Jefferson Pereira, who went down fighting 18-21, 12-21 against Russia's Maxim Sivolap and Igor Velichko in the men's top 16 clash.
On Saturday, Ahmed and Julio will face strong contenders Cuba in the quarter-finals. The Qatar pair is however confident riding on their recent triumph at the Grand Front Osaka Open in Japan last week.
The Qatar team is world ranked 12th after the A team qualified for the round of 16 in the recent world championship in Austria. Dutch qualifiers upset China to make top eight Earlier, Dutch qualifiers Dirk Boehle and Steven Van de Velde upset eighth seeds Li Zhuoxin and Zhou Chaowei of China in straight sets to make the last eight stage.
Boehle/van de Velde beat Li/Zhou in front of hundreds of home fans 2-0 (21-10, 21-18) for their third win in a row at the single elimination tournament. The Chinese duo stayed within 15-14 in the second set, but Boehle/van de Velde ran off three unanswered points and went on to wrap up the match in 29 minutes.
"We went all the way from the qualification to the quarterfinals, it feels great," said Boehle. "At the beginning we started pretty strong," van de Velde added."We had some trouble with the wind, but as well with the opponents. Our tactics worked very well in the first set. In the second, they started better and we had issues adapting. In the middle of the second set, we found a way and we worked through it."
Belgian duo on course Meanwhile, top seeds Dries Koekelkoren and Tom van Walle of Belgium outlasted Australia's Cole Durant and Zachery Schubert 2-1 (24-22, 20-22, 15-9) to march towards their first medal at a FIVB World Tour event.
The first two sets were hotly contested. Koekelkoren/van Walle withstood three set points to claim the opener while Durant/Schubert rallied from 20-19 down to level one set back. In the tie-breaker, the Belgians jumped to a 7-3 lead and never looked back. "We kept fighting the whole game," said Koekelkoren.
"The wind was very hard today, and that's the most important thing to handle. If you can play good with the wind, then you can win games. But it's hard, because you have to work really hard to play compact. Actually, the team that made less mistakes won the game. In the second set, we made too many mistakes, then we just tried to avoid the mistakes, and we won the tie-breaker."
Koekelkoren and van Walle were expecting to reach the podium for the first time at a FIVB World Tour event. "There are some very good teams here. Cuba, Qatar are really good teams. We just want to play match by match and our goal is to reach the podium. We really want a medal! We want to get our first FIVB medal."
Third seeds Nadir Diaz Gomez Nivaldo and Bayard Sergio Reynaldo Gonzalez of Cuba and fourth seeds Juan Virgen and Lombardo Ontiveros from Mexico both cruised into the quarterfinals.
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