Croatia is in the semi-finals!
The Croatian water polo team qualified for the semi-finals of the Olympic Games in Paris. Our young men played a great match against the current champion of Europe, Spain, and with a 10:8 victory, they entered the so-called medal zone'.
The Barracudas undoubtedly played the best match in the tournament so far. From the first to the last minute. From defense to attack. We don't remember when anyone managed to win the first quarter against the Spaniards without Furija scoring a single goal. It's even harder to remember when someone led 6:2 against Spain just half a minute before halftime!
Croatia did it all. Led by the phenomenal goalkeeper Marko Bijač in his characteristic and recognizable edition, with the experienced Mata Joković, the pro-life Loren Fatović and Konstantin Harkov, the centers Josip Vrlić and Luka Lončar, basically all 13 of our players deserve nothing but compliments.
Suffice it to say that Spain did not even manage to equalize for a single moment, let alone something more. After 6:2, our players mostly kept their lead at 2-3 goals. Only in the last quarter did the opponent threaten when they reduced the score to 8:7 and 9:8, that is, only one goal advantage for Croatia. But they couldn't go any further, it didn't go any further for Furia. Perfect defense led by true Bijač (10 defenses), but also with a lot of blocks, self-sacrifice, helping each other, with enormous energy consumption, brought this victory. Another big, significant victory for Croatian water polo. For the semi-finals of the Olympic Games in Paris.
In the semi-finals, Croatia will play against the better team from Italy - Hungary. The semi-final day is on Friday, August 9
Ivica Tucak,coach of the Croatian national team:
- Believe me, the match itself was the easiest. Quiet for an hour and a while. Those previous two days of waiting, a day and a half of torment full of questioning in the style of "are we you or not", then the first meeting, the second, the fifth, the seventeenth... Sleepless nights. I guess that's my cross that I carry inside me. I have never received anything easy in my life. Why it's good that we lost to the Americans, I think only He above knows. I am convinced that we will succeed on our way, that we will fulfill our dreams. Because we came here to win gold!
Marko Bijač:
- The difference between our defense against Spain and in most other matches is huge. The guys were really fantastic, from the first to the last. Exactly as we agreed. Energy, desire, self-sacrifice, all of that graced us. Defense is the part of the game that we improved the most compared to the first part of the group competition. When you end the first quarter against Spain 2:0, when they don't score a single goal... We are extremely happy, satisfied and now we turn to the semi-finals.
Maro Joković:
- I really don't remember anyone, and if so, when he dominated Spain like we do now. They didn't score a goal in the first quarter. Spain who were the main contenders for gold here. Few expected our performance like this. What adorns this team is the collective game, that desire, passion, fight for each other. We were caught up in a crisis in the last quarter because fatigue set in, but we didn't lose our attacking effect even then. It is important that we didn't back down even then, we didn't start to defend the result, but we continued to attack.
Josip Vrlić:
- This energy, this "madness", this is how we played in some parts of this tournament, but now we did it in the whole game. That's why we won. We, as he would say, play important matches, even though each one is important, we play very well. That is our strength. When we play like this, no one can beat us. Let's move on, but with this energy and defense... I think we can beat anyone. And Spain... They have beaten us many times in recent years, quite often, and now we have paid them back for all that.
Matias Biljaka:
- We told ourselves that defense is the most important. Without defense there is no attack. We didn't allow them their individual counter. We had to play very hard, strong from start to finish. We knew we had to cover Granados and Munarriz more, but they still clearly managed to score a goal. We raised our defense probably 200% compared to the previous game, we had blocks, we helped Bijač, and he returned it to us with a series of saves.
Loren Fatović:
- We played as if this was our last game. You can already see that at the Games every match is a story in itself. Maybe 90% of people already wrote us off before Spain, as well as at the beginning of the cycle, in the fall of 2021, when this very team was assembled in the first place. We don't care about others, we know what we are worth.
