Osaka, November 5, 2007: The head coaches of the six Site A teams gathered at the team hotel in Osaka on Monday for the FIVB press conference. A rematch ofthe 2007 European Championship final between Italy and Serbia will start the action at Namihaya Dome on Tuesday. Italy won 3-0 on that occasion, but 2006 World Championship bronze medallists Serbia have Beijing in their sights.

Here are the comments of the coaches, with the win-loss record of their teams after three of the 11 rounds of the World Cup.

Beato Miguel Cruz (Dominican Republic, 1-2): Overall we had good games in Tokyo. Many of our players are young, so our goal for this World Cup is for thoseyoung players to have a lot more good experience. I think they had this in Tokyo. There are still some problems and some goals to achieve, but we could winone game in Tokyo so that was good. Now in Osaka we will play Korea and Serbia. We have to take these games very seriously and try to improve and get good experience for the young players.

Massimo Barbolini (Italy, 3-0): About the match against Serbia, first of all we have to forget the last match because we won but it was one month ago. Tomorrow is for sure another match. It will be a very difficult match because we know that the Serbia team is a very strong team, a team at the same level asus. We know this match will be very, very important for the final ranking.
(On what he learned about Serbia from their 3-1 victory over Japan on Sunday)
Serbia’s match against Japan told me nothing knew about them. It confirmed my impression that they are a very strong team. For European teams, at some moments it is a little bit difficult to play against Japan, Korea or Thailand, but if you can play little by little, with patience, do not make mistakes and try to defend one more ball than the other team you can win — as Serbia did yesterday.
(On his squad rotation)
We are fortunate to have a good group of players. We have our basic team but we have to try and improve by playing all the players in this tournament, so yesterday I played Anzanello, Guiggi and Ortolani. It is important in a tournament with 11 matches that you have all 12 players ready to play on the court or on the bench, and I will try and maintain this situation.

Lee Jung-Chul (Korea, 0-3): These World Cup games are very difficult for us because of the strength of the other teams. In our team there are some playerswho are injured and the games are constant, almost every day, so to keep playing these players is very difficult for us. In Tokyo we lost three games but wehad a good opportunity for our young players to learn and improve more, so we will continue to make a big effort to win. The atmosphere in our teamis not so bad, so that is encouraging.

Zoran Terzic (Serbia, 3-0): (On the after-effects of Serbia’s epic win over Japan on Sunday night)
This game was almost the same as one year ago in the World Championship. We played very well in the first two sets but after the break the Japan team started to play excellently. Maybe they drink something very good in the 10 minutes, I don’t know! We have a very young team and we are playing this tournament without three or four very important players. We are playing with some new and young players and it is normal from time to time not to play very well, because you must play in front of 10,000 people for the first time in your life. It is not so easy. The young players played very well at the end of the game, especially Nesovic and Veljkovic. Tomorrow we play also a very important game against Italy. In the last year, Serbia and Italy played for the bronze medalat the World Championship and for the gold medal at the European Championship. I hope for a ticket to Beijing tomorrow.

Nataphon Srisamutnak (Thailand 0-3): We have to improve from our games in Tokyo. We gained some experience from these three games and now we have to win some games if we can. Still, the most important factor is that the other teams are the strongest in the world, especially tomorrow against Japan because itisvery important. Japan is one of the best teams in the world, very good in defence, so we will have to play at our best. We will try to do as much as wecan.

Shoichi Yanagimoto (Japan, 2-1): In the Tokyo series we did our best and the results went accordingly. This has gone and there is nothing we can do aboutit. I have to think about how we can play from now on. We must utilise our experience for the future. Every night we really appreciated having 10,000 spectators in the hall, and I have to thank them very much.

ends