Anton Levchenko’s wards achieved success after two losses. The Russian team was stronger with an advantage of seven goals — 31:31 (21:16). Ivan Osadchiy became the most resultative player of the Russian national team, 11 goals are on his account. Kirill Akramov scored 7 balls.
The head coach of the youth team Anton Levchenko told about the course of the match and shared his impressions of the sparrings with the team of Iran.
— Today the game wasn’t easy, to put it mildly. Though, like all three meetings in Teheran. Probably, the final score makes a false impression that the victory was achieved easily, but in fact, the intrigue remained until the very end. The start of the first half went under the usual scenario — we exchanged goals with Iran, the game went on the ball. But still a slight difference was on our side, which resulted in a one-two goal advantage in our favor. The key difference from the two previous meetings, when the Iran team held the end of the time better and took the lead in the score, was the fact that this time it was our team that acted this way. During two minutes and a half guys managed to score four time in a row, that formed a base for a comfort reserve before the break.
In the second half the hosts were involved in chase, and we had quite a lot of two-minute penalties. It was important, that the team kept calm during the second half and managed to find moments to attack even while being in a numerical minority. This is a visible result of the work on mistakes, made after the previous matches with the national team of Iran. The players start to act colder after being in similar situation before.
The score itself doesn’t reflect all the passions, that took place on the court. For example, only three of us had to defend in the last minutes after Ivan Shelmenko and Kirill Akramov were shown red cards. But the players continued to execute our game plan, noticeably minimized the amount of unforced mistakes and acted pretty good in minority in attack.
To summarize the results of our trip, it was a very valuable experience. All the three matches turned out to be hard-fought, none of teams wanted to cede. It can explain the increased intensity and big amount of penalties. But We are particularly pleased with the fact, that we have the final word in this confrontation,— the HFR official web-site quotes the words of Anton Levchenko.
Photo: rushandball.ru
