Osaka, Japan, September 28, 2019 – Russia beat Kenya 3-0 (25-16, 25-21, 25-22) on the 10th day of the FIVB Women’s World Cup at Osaka’s Edion Arena on Saturday.
Russia coach Sergio Busato: "Kenya had a good attack today with good serves. I have big respect for their volleyball. This tournament is hard because you meet many different schools of volleyball, but it’s good for us to experience these different types and adapt to their different types of play. Today, Russia blocked well and I think that was the main reason for our win. Tomorrow, we have another hard match against Brazil. For us, it’s a good preview for the Olympic Games, so we will be trying hard to win the match."
Russia player Nataliya Goncharova: "We won 3-0 so we’re happy and it was good to get this win. Our record in this tournament is not really as good as we wanted but I’m really thankful for all the support we’ve had from our fans, as well as our head coach and other coaches. It’s been good."
Kenya coach Paul Bitok: "I want to congratulate my friend and coach [Sergio Busato] for a good performance in this competition. From my side, I’m quite happy with the performance of my team. At the beginning of the tournament, I said to myself I wanted to do things that the high-level countries do. We’ve started to play more like them. We’re not consistent but we are starting to play a faster game. We are using a system for blocking and in attack we have to increase the speed to create chances for the attackers. I hope these players have learned and I have insisted that we continue with the same system. We might win; we might not win, but as you can see, what we have started is producing results. Many times, we didn’t reach 10 points against Russia, but today we reached 21, 22. This is a great performance for us. I know everyone is expecting us to win some sets, but as I said we are starting to play modern volleyball and in two or three years we can be better. Yesterday, we had trouble in reception. We worked in the morning and today we were at 70 percent. As I said, we are not consistent but this is because this is new to us, but I believe that it is working well. I hope the same will apply tomorrow against our sisters from African, Cameroon, and I believe that next time we play Russia we will get more and take sets from them. We met Cameroon twice last month and we won one and lost one. We want to win tomorrow so it will help us in our January meeting in the Olympic qualifiers and give us more determination and give the players belief in themselves so that we will have a better chance of coming back here in 2020."
Kenya captain Mercy Moim: "Today, we played a good match. Russia is a big team and to make scores of 22 and 21 against them is a big achievement for my team. Yesterday, I told you that we would have to work on our reception and defence and that’s what we did in the evening, and you can see today it helped us so much today. Tomorrow, we want to do the same as today in terms of serve and reception. We play a lot against Cameroon, so we know their strengths and weaknesses."
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