Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena don’t typically lose a lot of beach volleyball matches. Losing consecutive times to the same teams it’s even less usual, so the Americans were understandably relieved when they ousted Dutch Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen at the Round of 16 of the A1 Major Vienna presented by Swatch.
Their 21-18, 16-21, 15-13 victory at the Red Bull Beach Arena not only sent them through the quarter-finals at the Danube Island but it also ended a three-match winning streak of the Europeans over them with all three games happening within the last month.
“I thought we sided out really great and I got on a roll with my blocking in the end,” Phil explained. “Playing these guys is always tough and I’m glad we got this one after losing the last three.”
The ‘Thin Beast’ did indeed a great job at the net, scoring as many as nine blocking points, but according to Nick the biggest difference of the match came from the service lines.
“Service pressure was the main difference,” Nick analyzed. “The last two times they beat us they served us off the court and today they made a lot of service errors. That obviously helped us and we were able to apply more service pressure on them too, especially with Phil, who was jump serving for part of the match.”
The Americans are now set to play Germans Nils Ehlers and Lars Flüggen, who eliminated the Grimalt cousins Marco and Esteban with a 21-14, 19-21, 15-13 Round of 16 win.
“We trained with them before the World Championships in Hamburg,” Nick added. “Nils is a huge guy, has got some broad shoulders and is picking up the game really fast. And Lars has been around for a while, has a lot of experience and has won in the World Tour. We’ll need to play great.”
