The Brazilians avenged their Vienna's bronze medal match setback to Keizer/Meppelink

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Antonelli was pleased by the team's performance against the Dutch

The A1 Vienna Major presented by Swatch didn’t well for Brazilians Maria Elisa Antonelli and Carolina Solberg. And they blame Dutch Madelein Meppelink and Sanne Keizer, who beat them in the bronze medal match at the Danube Island and denied their first podium appearance in the Beach Major Series, for that.

The Brazilians, however, had to wait just two weeks to get revenge as the teams crossed paths again in the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Finals Hamburg 2018 presented by Vodafone and this time Maria Antonelli and Carol had the upper hand, winning 2-1 (21-14, 16-21, 15-8).

“I think that our big mistake in Vienna was that we decided to change a strategy that had worked against them before,” Antonelli explained. “We returned to it here and it was obviously the right choice. Playing against them is always tough because they have a great setting ability and it gives them a lot of possibilities. We need to be patient to understand it and to react to what they do and we did that today.”  

The Brazilians will try to keep their strategy sharp on Saturday, when they end their pool play schedule against Germany’s Julia Sude and Chantal Laboureur. They’ve beat the Europeans twice in 2018 and, according to Antonelli, that makes the game even trickier.

“We never lost to them and that’s where it could get dangerous,” Antonelli added. “Since we’ve beaten them before, we tend to stick to our strategy and they will certainly try to bring something different to the table”.

“We need to be smart to identify it and prepared to make the changes we need. It’s not easy to pick up these things because you need to try to get into the opponents’ mind and figure out what they are looking for. We need to be even more attentive now.”

The Dutch are now in a tough spot on Pool A as they lost all their three matches so far. Their last hopes of advancing to the elimination round lay on a victory against Americans Summer Ross and Sara Hughes on Saturday.

“We couldn’t show our best level and we couldn’t find ways to let it go and just focus on the next point,” Keizer said. “It’s not good that our game isn’t coming out this tournament, but we still have one more game to go and we’ll fight with all we have to make things better.”

That's some serious net patrolling from @bvuilleumier 🙌 Watch all of day 3 of #HamburgFinals on BeachStream [link in bio] @vodafone_de @hamburg_de @redbullgermany

1,091 Likes, 10 Comments - Beach Volleyball Major Series (@beachmajorseries) on Instagram: "That's some serious net patrolling from @bvuilleumier 🙌 Watch all of day 3 of #HamburgFinals on..."