Argentina to play fourth Pan Am Cup title match in a row

CORDOBA, Mexico, September 1, 2018. - Argentina moved into their fourth Pan American Cup title match in a row after defeating Cuba 3-1 (21-25, 25-18, 25-19, 25-20) in semifinals of the thirteenth edition of the event being held at Arena Cordoba in Cordoba, Mexico.

Defending champions Argentina recovered from losing the first set, as Cuba’s powerful attackers always kept them down on scores. From the second set forward, Argentina re designed their strategy with faster and coordinated moves to keep a comfortable margin in the remaining sets.

Argentina preserved over Cuba with 57-52 margin in attacks, 10-9 in blocks and benefited from 29 Cuban errors, while Cuba led in serves by 2-0 and scored on 19 opponent errors.

Argentina’s balanced offense was led by Ezequiel Palacios (17pts.), Nicolas Bruno (14pts.), Luciano Palonsky (12pts.) and Joaquin Gallego (10pts.). Cuba distributed their points between Javier Concepción and Roamy Alonso with 12 points apiece, and Miguel Angel Lopez with Jesus Herrera added 9 points.

Nicolas Bruno captain of Argentina indicated “it’s always a joy to play a title match. I consider that we’ve been working well here, we deserve to be in the final and we really are enjoying today’s victory. Cuba is a worthy opponent, they have a long history and they are tough to face, it was a difficult start for us; we adjusted our tactics and played better than them”.

When asked about Argentina’s success in Pan American Cups, head coach Alejandro Grossi said “it’ the continuous work of many years, coming from our basis (youth, junior and U23 categories) something that come to reflect in our senior division. I congratulate our staff and players”.

Nicolás Vives, coach of Cuba said his team had a good first set, “then our performance was weaker and Argentina capitalized on that, they grew and performed better. Tomorrow we are coming out strong to win a medal. I believe that we respected Argentina too much, we could have beaten them, we lacked aggressiveness; the positive outcome is that our bench players did a swell job”.