Italy rally past Brazil for Olympic men's volleyball quarters

World Cup runners-up Italy rallied past the host Brazil 3-1 here Saturday evening to lead five teams into the men's volleyball quarter-finals of the Rio Games.

Italy extended their winning streak at the Rio Games to four with the 23-25, 25-23, 25-22 and 25-15 victory while Brazil slipped to a 2-2 win-loss record.

Ivan Zaytsev led Italy with 20 points and Osmany Juantorena, Filippo Lanza and Emanuele Birarelli added 15, 14 and 13 points respectively.

The Italians outblocked Brazil 13-8 and produced six aces, compared to none of Brazil.

The United States defeated France 3-1 (25-22, 25-22, 14-25, 25-22) for their second consecutive victory in Pool A after dropping the first two matches at the Rio Games.

Aaron Russell and Matthew Anderson scored 18 points apiece to lead the American offense while Taylor Sander contributed 13 points in the victory.

Antonin Rouzier and Earvin Ngapeth were the top French scorers with 25 and 22 points.

In Saturday's other match in pool A, Canada overcame Mexico 3-0.

With the last round of round robin play scheduled on Monday, Italy have already secured the top finish in pool A with a 4-0 record while Brazil, France, Canada and the United States all kept alive their hopes of qualifying for the knockout stage with two wins against two losses.

In a pool B clash, Russia outlasted Poland in five sets 3-2 (25-18, 16-25, 25-18, 22-25, 15-13) despite a 36-point effort by Polish opposite hitter Bartosz Kurek.

With the hard-fought victory, Russia snapped a three-match winning streak of Poland and improved to a 3-1 win-loss record in Pool B.

Maxim Mikhaylov led Russia with 18 points, followed by Egor Kliuka and Sergey Tetyukhin who finished with 16 and 15, respectively.

Poland's Mateusz Bieniek was the only other player on the defeated side in double scoring digit with 10 points.

Trailing 14-10 in the tie-breaker, Poland sparked a three-point rally to close the gap, but Rafal Buszek served long to surrender the match to Russia.

"We really needed this victory. We won but we need to move forward to win the succeeding matches," said Russia coach Alekno Vladimir. "We had some technical mistakes, I think it's because we were nervous a little bit in this match."

Also in pool B, Iran swept Egypt 3-0 and Argentina beat Cuba in straight sets.

Argentina, Poland, Russia and Iran have earned enough points to secure their berths in the quarter-finals while Egypt and Cuba have only honor to play for in the last round of the preliminaries on Monday. Endit