Bahrain’s spikers bow out of medal contention

TDT | Manama    

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain were yesterday eliminated from further medal contention in the men’s volleyball tournament at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China.

The Kingdom’s senior men’s national team lost to their counterparts from Qatar 1-3 (23-25, 25-18, 19-25, 17-25) in a dramatic round-of-12 encounter.

The Bahrainis were thus relegated to playing for a final classification between seventh and 12th. Their next opponent will be South Korea in a game scheduled to take place tomorrow.

The Koreans were losers against Pakistan in straight sets in another top 12 contest yesterday.

In Bahrain’s loss to Qatar, their superstar trio of Mohammed Yaqoob, Ali Ebrahim and skipper Naser Anan tried valiantly to lead their team against the heavily favoured Qataris, but went down fighting.

Yaqoob scored 18 points to lead the Bahrainis in defeat, while Ebrahim and Anan finished with 13 apiece. Abbas Al Khabbaz added nine points while Moham - med Jassim had five and

Mahmood Alafyah one point.

For the Qataris, Raimi Wadidie was their leading scorer with 18 points , while Mohamed Ibrahim and Youssef Oughlaf had 15 markers each.

Qatar move on to face South Korea in the quarter-finals, with the winners advancing to face Iran in the last four.

The nationals, coached by Ruben Adrian Wolochin from Argentina, have a 12-player squad in Hangzhou.

Aside from Yaqoob, Ebrahim , Anan, Al Khabbaz, Jassim and Alafyah, the rest of the team includes Ayman Haroona, Abbas Sultan, Ali Habib, Hussain Mahdi , Sayed Hashim Issa and Hussain Ehsan.

By playing in the seventhto-12th classification bracket, Bahrain will be hoping to improve on their classification from the previous time they took part in men’s volleyball at the Asian Games in 2006 in Doha. They ranked eighth then from the 17 teams that took part.