Qatar’s Younousse-Tijan win silver from fourth straight final

The finalists on the podium for the 2021 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Sochi 4-star tournament on Sunday.

Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan, seeded fourth, featured in their fourth back-to-back final when they played Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak in the final of the Sochi 4-star tournament on the 2021 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour on Sunday, but stopped short of claiming a second consecutive gold and had to settle for silver. The 18th-seeded team won the final 2-1 (17-21, 23-21, 15-10). The Polish duo has now collected a total of three gold, six silver and five bronze medals on the Tour, but the last time they were on top of the podium was almost three years ago, at home in Warsaw. Younousse and Tijan as a team now have two gold, three silver and three bronze medals. The bronze went to 14th-seeded Christiaan Varenhorst and Steven van de Velde of the Netherlands. It was the second World Tour podium for the Dutch pair, after another bronze they won back in May 2019 at the Itapema 4-star. Tijan shrugged off some kind of an injury he sustained upon a dive early into the gold medal match. Initially, Kantor and Losiak opened a lead, but failed to hold on to the three-point advantage they had at 13-10. Younousse and Tijan took control through the rest of the set and won it by a comfortable 21-17. It was time for the Poles to fight back from a solid deficit in set two. They kept their cool in the money time and with a couple of aces along the way wiped out an 18-14 Qatari lead and denied two Qatari match points before levelling the match after Losiak’s 23-21 winner. The high stakes of the tie-breaker took their toll in terms of way too many unforced errors on both sides, but the suspense was there through most of the set. When it counted the most, Kantor practically owned the net and, with a couple of monster blocks, handed his team the victory at 15-10. Varenhorst and Van de Velde beat Italy’s Adrian Carambula and Enrico Rossi 2-1 (21-16, 26-28, 15-9) in the bronze medal match. Two hard-fought semifinals produced the finalists yesterday morning. In the first one, Younousse and Tijan fought their way back from a devastating first set, to make it to their fourth consecutive final after a 2-1 (12-21, 21-18, 15-13) victory over Varenhorst and Van de Velde. In the second, Kantor and Losiak achieved their comeback before the end of a very tight first set and rode the momentum on to a 2-0 (25-23, 21-16) win over Carambula and Rossi.(FIVB)