The winner – Great Britain, the fighter – Azerbaijan
On the third day of the competition, in group A great Britain and Azerbaijan met first.
Those were teams who won one and lost one before. The game was tense. Before the break, the British sometimes led 5-6-7 goals but after the break Azerbaijan found enough power to fight and demonstrate the example of real strong character. They equalized three times (28:28; 29:29; 30:30). In the last two minutes, Caucasians reduced the difference to one goal but failed to snatch victory from the opponent – 35:36.
The best player from the Great Britain was Christopher White, the scorer of 6 goals out of 8 attampts. The man of the matrch from Azerbaijan was Sabir Nazarailiev, who scored 8 times.
Kevin Matthews, Team Manager: We’ve done our research on Azerbaijan, it’s always difficult to play 3 games in 3 days. We thought our offence was going to be too fast for them, defencively we did a good job, I think we should work on few things really, but at the moment we’re going to go away do some meetings, video stuff, but the main priority is to celebrate now. We’ve won 2 games now, we’ve got a couple of players joining us, who have been involved in Spanish league playoffs over the weekend, they will join us in the morning, so that will freshen the team up. We will have a whole new dinamic. It is a rest day tommorrow, which is good and then we will go against China, give our 100% and do our very best, I would rate todays game with a 9.
Habil Alyev, Coach B of Azerbaijan: Our team fought to the end despite the fact that we were 6-7 goals down. Not every team can do this. Fortune was not on our side. I want also to praise rivals. I would rate our game with 6 out of 10.