Coach Kolakovic admitted that the opening loss against Poland may have affected Serbia
Lodz, Poland, September 15, 2014 - After a first round that came out as they expected, everything changed for Serbia in the second phase of the FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship Poland 2014. The world No. 6 opened their run in Lodz with high hopes, but three straight defeats put an end to the dream of going further.
Serbia - counting also the participations of Yugoslavia and Serbia & Montenegro - had made it into the Final Four at FIVB Men's World Championship in their last four appearances but this time they fell short, even outside the eight main teams of the final ranking.
"Our expectation before this Championship was definitely much bigger than this. Our goal was to make it into the top six, but to be honest we hoped for some medal," admitted Serbia's Milos Nikic on their final day in Lodz, while his teammates performed their last struggle against Iran. "We don’t know yet what went wrong; we’ve never played so bad like now" - he continued. "We played without energy and that never happened to us before."
Coach Igor Kolakovic dug deeper and analysed the game of his team: "Two things were missing for us at this World Championship – the service, as a very important volleyball element, and positive energy as a mental element. We lost this energy very quickly during the matches."
While Nikic failed to explain why this happened, coach Kolakovic recalled the tough loss against Poland in the opening match in Warsaw. "It had a big impact. We came to Poland to play this first match against the host team very motivated, but I think we lost this energy and will to fight very early after that game."
"In the last years we were always among the top three, but all teams train a lot and make some progress. We’re going to analyse all this things and try to learn a lesson, but for sure during a World Championship there’s no place and time to greatly improve your play" - Kolakovic completed.
Nikic, however, underlined the great atmosphere built in Poland regardless of their results. "This World Championship has been amazing; we don’t have such atmosphere in our country. In my opinion, here we had the best ever organisation and ambience, and Polish fans even supported us, which makes us happy," he stated.