Vujasinovic summed up the win after the final whistle:
“With all due respect, Slovenia is far below our level, but I have to praise the boys because they played a serious match from start to finish. I think that’s very important for the start of the tournament. We have a day off next, then a tougher training session against Spain, and after that we face Montenegro, which will more or less be the real start of the Mediterranean Games for us.”
Montenegro arrives thirty minutes before kickoff, then grinds past Greece
While Serbia was routing Slovenia, Montenegro was fighting through a tight contest against Greece in the same group, eventually winning 16-14, with quarter scores of 4-3, 5-2, 3-4 and 4-5. Before the match, the Montenegrin team ran into a problem rarely seen at this level of competition: the bus carrying them missed the pool, and the squad arrived on site roughly half an hour before the start, sharing the same vehicle with their Greek opponents.
Head coach Dejan Savic offered no excuses after the win.
“It’s true we had bad luck getting here, but the Greeks were on the same bus with us. We arrived literally half an hour before the match, and that’s no excuse at all. From the start you could see a disastrous approach, and you can’t play like this.”
What bothered him more than the late arrival, though, was the number of goals his side conceded.
“Conceding 14 goals against a Greece like this one says it all. It’s time for criticism, time to wake up. We trained for three months for this competition, and if the boys don’t understand where they are, we might as well go home right now.”
Savic already had an eye on Sunday, when his team faces Serbia, and aimed a warning directly at his own bench, saying, “If we keep playing like this, we’ll lose to Serbia by ten goals.”
What’s next in Group A
Group A at the Mediterranean Games in Taranto features Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Slovenia, alongside Group B, which includes Spain, France, Italy, Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbia played its match against Slovenia on Friday, August 28, at 4:00 PM, and the second round is now up next.
Serbia and Montenegro meet on Sunday, August 30, at 5:30 PM, and the match carries extra weight: the winner advances straight to the semifinals, while the loser has to fight through an additional playoff for placement. After that, on September 1 at 5:30 PM, Serbia faces Greece, the team that gave Montenegro far more trouble than the final score suggested.
A 31-goal margin over Slovenia is a striking number for the standings, but Sunday’s derby is the game that actually carries weight. Montenegro conceded 14 goals to Greece, and Savic made no secret that it worries him, while Serbia showed in the opening round that concentration is not an issue even once the result is long decided. On paper, the favorite is clear, but paper doesn’t count in the pool. Quarters do, and Vujasinovic’s team played the first four exactly the way its coach asked.