Nicaragua also to "quarters" to overcome Haiti

HAVANA, Cuba, August 29, 2018 - Despite the shock Nicaragua managed to overcome Haiti 3-1 (25-17, 17-25, 25-20, 25-13) and secured a spot for group B in the quarter-finals tomorrow in the Norceca Sub-21 Men's Volleyball Tournament, whose preliminary phase closes today in the Sports City.

By statistics they were well leveled with the advantage offor the Central Americans in attack (49-43) and blocking (8-7), and in service for the Caribbean rivals (4-7), but these gave away 31 points via unforced errors.

Also Haiti had the leading scorer of the clash, the opposite Jean Bayol with 27 points, supported by the wing spiker Edgar Damay with 10. However the Nicaraguans had a wider and better distributed offensive led by corner players Jonny Zeledón (25) and Byron Hernández (17), and the central Enmanuel Reyes (10).

Osman Hernandez, Nicaraguan coach, said that "at the beginning it was a very even match, in the second set we won, they have a very strong serve that hurt us a lot but we managed to maintain ourselves, so we pushed the floating service, which is our characteristic, because we were doing it with a jump and it did not work and we went back to our origin and the boys did very well, that was key even though Byron in the fourth scored them jumping, now to think about tomorrow's challenge, which will be stronger ".

His captain Jonny Zeledón declared that "we are happy with this first victory, Haiti is a high team, but we were able to take advantage of every mistake and go up, we have achieved a goal, the advance to the quarterfinals".

Adolphe Ralph, coach of Haiti, acknowledged that "my team commits many faults, could not attack and then it is impossible to win, boys can play, be coordinated, but I do not know what happened to them, so for tomorrow I think we are going to be another team to make a good game."

His captain, corner player Edgar Dimitri Dumay, expressed with dismay that "I do not know why we lost, I am very discouraged. We started strong, we thought we could win but we could not do anything".