Dutch rookies and Spanish veterans keep going forward in Vienna
13.08.2021 - Vienna, Austria
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Youth and experience found success in the men's tournament of the A1 CEV EuroBeachVolley Vienna 2021 presented by Swatch on Friday as the Netherland's Stefan Boermans/Yorick de Groot and Spain's Pablo Herrera/Adrian Gavira have both advanced to the quarterfinals in the Austrian capital.
Competing in the EuroBeachVolley for the first time, the 26-year-old Boermans and the 21-year-old de Groot had a strong performance in the Round of 16, where they eliminated then-undefeated Belgians Dries Koekelkoren and Tom van Walle in two sets (21-15, 21-18).
The winners of the World Tour four-star event in Gstaad last month will now face Czech Olympians Ondrej Perusic and David Schweiner, who advanced to the quarterfinals after their straight-set (21-14, 21-13) victory over Latvian veterans Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Janis Smedins.
“We’re very familiar with the Belgians and we’ve played them several times and even practice together at times,” Boermans said. “We’ve played the Czechs in Sochi and watched a lot of their matches too, so we’ll try to come up with a good game plan for them. It will be great to return to the Red Bull Beach Arena. We played against the Austrians there in the first time and the fans were obviously all against us, but hopefully now they cheer a little bit for us too.”
Playing in their 12th edition of the EuroBeachVolley together, Spanish veterans Pablo Herrera and Adrian Gavira, who won the tournament in Klagenfurt back in 2013, were also at their best on Friday as they eliminated reigning world champions and Tokyo Olympic silver medalists Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov of Russia in the Round of 16.
The veterans fought hard to secure a 2-1 (21-16, 19-21, 15-12) victory and move on to the quarterfinals, where they’ll play Polish Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak, who knocked out 2019 World Championship silver medalists Julius Thole and Clemens Wickler of Germany in straight sets (21-18, 21-18).
"We had a great performance," Gavira said. "I felt like we were extra motivated to get revenge against them for our match at the Olympics. It was a really close match and I think some of the adjustments we made worked well. Stoyanovskiy has put a lot of pressure on us with his serves and that made things more difficult for us but our side out was strong the entire match. We hope we can keep that same level against Kantor and Losiak."
