Toronto, Canada, September 14, 2016 - Tri Bourne and John Hyden of the United States posted a 2-1 (19-21, 21-19, 15-12) win in 54 minutes over Evandro Goncalves and Pedro Solberg of Brazil here Wednesday afternoon in a Pool D match on Polson Pier at the SWATCH FIVB World Tour Finals.
It was the first FIVB World Tour match between the two teams as Evandro and Pedro finished ninth at the Rio 2016 Olympics last month on Copacabana while the Americans missed qualifying for the "Summer" Games after finish third in their country's competition for the quadrennial behind compatriots Phil Dalhausser/Nick Lucena and Jake Gibb/Casey Patterson.
Pedro Solberg - "We didn’t play good, we played badly and we were not very consistent, we had a lot of ups and downs in the game. If you don’t play good, this is high-level stuff."
(On all teams advancing from pool play) "Well, that’s great to hear. Perfect. You made my day. I think we still have a lot to improve and with this rule it’s going to help us, definitely, because I’ve been sick for the last two weeks and we had only two practices before we came here. For sure we need to practice and improve."
Tri Bourne - "I always expect us to win. We played them probably a year and a half ago (actually vs. Evandro/Vitor Felipe) and somehow haven’t played them since. It was a long time coming but it’s always fun when we play those guys."
"In my opinion we should have won the first set. It was a few of our errors that let them win it. That kind of built my confidence for next. We just needed to take care of the simple plays and we would win."
"We played these Canadians (Saxton/Schalk) a good amount of times and we’ve done well against them. They know us well, we know them well so it’ll be a battle."
John Hyden - (On dealing with Evandro) "He’s kind of the “X” factor for every team. They can give up some points and get points right back on his serve really quick. The first game we made some errors, they didn’t serve all that well. We did not capitalize. Luckily we got out to a lead in the second game because obviously you guys saw some gnarly serves out of him. We were able to fight him off toward the end and that was the outcome of the game."