Excitement levels have reached fever pitch for Wednesday’s round of last 16 encounters when participating teams will have to give it all-out in the knockout phase to keep their high hopes of advancing to the quarterfinals and semifinals in the AVC Beach Tour Bandar Abbas Open in Bandar Abbas, Iran alive.
The pool round-robin preliminaries came to a conclusion on Tuesday, with hosts Iran ruling the roost. Thanks to such fantastic support from home fans at the competition venue, three Iranian pairings captured the top spots in Pool A, Pool B and Pool H. Chinese teams topped Pool C and Pool D, while Qataris maintained their top position in Pool E and Japanese pairings topped Pool F and Pool G.
However, the Wednesday’s round of last 16 encounters sees three teams from the host country strut their stuff, while the remaining 13 teams consist three apiece from Australia and China, two each from Qatar, Thailand and Japan and one from Kazakhstan.
Unfortunately, two teams from Hong Kong China and one each from Kazakhstan, India and Iran could not go the distance and crashed out of the five-day, men’s only tournament following two straight losses in their pools.
Pool A was dominated by top seeds Abolhamed Mirzaali/Arash Vakili, who routed Indians Naresh Tumpera/Raju Krishnam 2-0 in their opening clash on Monday. Naresh/Raju succumbed to their second loss at the hands of Australians Joshua Howat/Jack Pearse after going down 16-21, 18-21 the following day to end their campaign in Bandar Abbas.
Mirzaali/Vakili still proved their class in the Tuesday afternoon to easily shut out Howat and Pearse 21-13, 21-9 to top Pool A.
Iranians Sina Shokati Shekarsaraei/Abbas Pourasgaari stayed atop Pool B with two wins in a row. In their first clash, they recovered from a poor start to beat second seeds Zachary Schubert/Thomas Hodges from Australia in hard-fought three-setter 14-21, 23-21, 15-13.
The Iranian duo continued their winning streak in their second match against Nurdos Aldash/Kirill Gurin to beat the Kazakh pairing 21-18, 21-17. Schubert and Hodges, who captured three titles this year including the September’s AVC Beach Tour Samila Open in Thailand and the last month’s Matsuyama Beach Volleyball Tour in Japan, also turned things around to power past the Kazakh duo 21-5, 21-15 in their second encounter to make the cut for the round of the last 16.
Chinese players claimed the top spots in Pool C and Pool D, with third seeds Ha Likejiang/Wu Jiaxin…
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