1999 🇳🇱 Netherlands vs Japan 🇯🇵 🏐 Women Volleyball 🏐 FIVB World Grand Prix

Before 1999, Cuba, China, Russia, Brazil were tier 1 teams in women volleyball world. Japan, South Korea, USA, Italy were tier 2-3 teams. After 1998, this landsacpe had changed. China team level of standard kept dropping after Lang Ping step down and Brazilians were getting old. The only teams remained worth to watch were Cuba, Russia and South Korea.
Post-Match Commentary :
This was Week 2 held in Taiwan. Nippon #13 Miki Sasaki (23yo, 1.82m) played as opposite hitter this year. But I felt the Libero #3 Hiroko Tsukumo (29yo, 1.75m) defence had been weaker compared to 1998 World Championship. Dutch girls used mainly the same squad as 1998. Dutch #12 Elles Leferink (22yo, 1.76m) was definitely the key player in the team since 1996. Her serve was very powerful and low mistake rate. Netherlands participated in 1996 Summer Olympic because they won against Croatia in final of European Championship. She was elected "best player of Europe' aged 19 in 1995. She award the 'Best Server' in World Championship 1998 & European Championship in 2003. In the match, both teams fought for the last rank of this tournament, i.e. rank 7 or 8th in the final ranking. Both teams showed a very unstable performance and made quite a lot of mistakes. You can see their performance is very inconsistent during the match. In 5th set, Dutch used strong attacks as a way to score. Nippon unable to defence the spikes from Dutch squad.