With Parubets not making it to Tokyo, I think Russia's OH roster is now more or less set: Voronkova, Fedorovtseva, Kosheleva & Smirnova (Smirnova can do both attack and reception duties, but of course not as efficient as Parubets). Only remaining question mark is the 3rd MB and Goncharova's backup (most likely Lazareva).
And the 2nd setter.
Today's game, although winning or losing would not have much impact on the final 4, at least we saw Russian started to shuffle its starting lineups. Kudos!! At the end, Russian won great! But the best thing coming out from this game is Fedorovtseva did great on the defense and on the reception. Double Kudos!!
I don't know, but that doesn't matter because the result will be the same
. The biggest mistake of Busato, besides what we've already mentioned, is to not have brought any defensive spiker (Oh2). The five Russian OH played like Oh1 in the last season
. IMO, he thought that the men's scheme was gonna succeed in women's volleyball. I mean, tall MBs and a bad-receiver duo (like Kliuka-Volkov, Leal-Lucarelli, etc). Now, after VNL he must call three Oh2 (Frolova, Kotikova, and anyone who's not Shcherban
) because any good-serving team will easily beat them like we saw last week.
BTW, Busato must call Kadochkina ASAP if Kosheleva and Voronkova continue with their weak attacks.
That is true for sure they are out of "the top 3" finish. If Busato is not a fool, he should have already known his "starting 6" is pretty weak, with them Russian team won't go anywhere. Now I want to see how Busato is going to wise up by putting together a team that will be at least competitive and plan for the future right now. They have two very bad backup MBs that really puzzled everyone for the selections.
Does anyone know who will be rotated in for the remaining games?
I expected the loss against Brazil today but I didn't expect Russia would lose that bad. Okay, Busato decided to start the game with the inexperienced players and sure, they made mistakes but I think it was a questionable decision to sub them out so early in that first set. He didn't gave them a chance to grow into the game. That could possibly ruin their confidence. I was hoping for a win in the third set, but sadly, it didn't happen and Brazil crushed Russia convincingly in straight sets.
It's painful watching Russia play this way and it's so easy to count them out after this loss, but then again, this is just one game. A lot of things can still change in the next games and hopefully, like Karch used to say, "good things will happen."
Use a new line up for the game against Brazil did make sense but the problem is I do not think this new line up has ever been trained together as a team. No one knows what to do, they were totally only a group of players but not a team at all. By protecting the main players from the humiliation of defeat while hang this young group out dry is really bad coaching. Now I seriously doubt the ability of this coach.
Let us hope tomorrow will be a better day
Fedorovtseva was not only excellent at attacking with 13/24 (54%) hitting, 2 blocks, 3 aces, but also did great on defense and reception today! Superb!!! Without her Russian team might well have lost today's game.
Russian only need to force serve and be calm at clutch cause italy is so bad at receive and can close a game
Good point. I think this line-up, everyone can force serve, if needed we can sub Kapustina in for Fetisova to serve.
It seems to me that Busato has no clue what he is doing other than sticking to the old system -- old line-up, everything to Goncharova -- let me try pretend to be Russian women volleyball coach for tomorrow's game against Italy.
Setter: Lazareva
OPP: Smirnova
OH: Fredorovtseva, Voronkova
MB: Korolova, Fetisova (never use Malygina and Brovkina, they will only hurt the team rather than help the team)
L: Zaytseva
Italian is a young team but fast, Old system of Russian women volleyball is too slow to deal with a fast team, later on to deal with Japanese is even more so.
I just like to share a little stats here:
For the lost game to Dutch, Fedorovtseva had a stunning 56% hitting success rate (14 out of 25), despite she had to deal with some bad set balls, plus 3/3 blocks and one ace. I don't know who else on this Russian team has such an outstanding performance.
