Qatar’s Younousse and Tijan top Pool G in Warsaw
Warsaw, Poland: Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan emerged on the top of the Pool G table at the Warsaw four-star stop on the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour after claiming a straight-set (21-16, 21-17) victory over USA’s Trevor Crabb and Tri Bourne.
The seventh-seeded Qataris now face a tough challenge as they go against third-seeded Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy of Russia in the second knockout round.
Krasilnikov and Stoyanovskiy lost to Brazil’s Alison Cerutti and Alvaro Morais Filho 1-2 (18-21, 21-17, 12-15) in Pool C.
Cerutti and Alvaro Morais Filho will face Chile’s Marco Grimalt & Esteban Grimalt for a spot in the quarterfinals.
In Pool F, Evandro Goncalves Oliveira Junior and Bruno Oscar Schmidt mastered a 2-0 (21-16, 21-18) shutout of sixth-seeded Italians Paolo Nicolai and Daniele Lupo and are waiting for their second elimination round rivals — Latvia’s Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Janis Smedins.
Meanwhile, Julius Thole and Clemens Wickler were the only one of three German teams to make it successfully through the pool stage.
Thole and Wickler, seeded 13th, had a tough encounter with fourth-seeded American standouts Nicholas Lucena and Philip Dalhausser for the first place in Pool D. The Germans cruised to an emphatic 21-13 win of the first set. They were leading 4-2 in the second, when the US team withdrew from the match and from the tournament, due to Dalhausser’s painful discomfort in the abdominal muscles.
Thole and Wickler’s next opponents will be Russia’s Nikita Liamin and Taras Myskiv, who hammered out an eye-catching 2-1 (20-22, 21-19, 15-10) comeback against USA’s Trevor Crabb and Tri Bourne in the first elimination round.
