2004 🇨🇳 China vs Germany 🇩🇪 🏐 Women Volleyball 🏐 BCV Montreux Volley Masters

Montreux Volley Masters (Or BCV) was the first warm up tournament before World Grand Prix since 90s. It held around May to June before WGP. In 90s-early 00s, most players mainly played in their country league locally or train in national team. It didn't happen a situation that players finished the league in mid May then back to national team to play series of warm up games right after the season ended nowadays. So, even it was a warm up game, players performance wasn’t too bad in this tournament.
Post-Match Commentary :
In 2004, China, Cuba, Russia, Germany assigned in the same pool. First two rank teams will enter semi-final to play against other pool top 2 teams (Italy, USA, Japan, Poland). This was preliminary round Day 2 Game 1 match.
China was champion in 2003 World Cup. #8 Zhao Ruirui (23yo, 1.96m) award as best spiker and 2nd best blocker. But her leg was broken during 2004 winter training. #18 Zhang Ping (22yo, 1.88m) replaced her position. The lineup was the same as 2003 for rest of the positions. Gemany played better since 2002. Their Korean coach made the team defences and 1st pass improved. For Germnay, the main scored players were #15 Angelina Grün (25yo, 1.85m) & #16 Judith Sylvester (27yo, 1.93m). #17 Birgit Thumm (24yo, 1.84m) was new also shared the responsibility for score. China without #8 made the match entered into 5th set. China played not very well vs 2003 World Cup. But their patience, experience along with particular players good performance rescue the game. #7 Zhou Suhong (25yo, 1.82m) & #4 Liu Yanan (24yo, 1.86m) were the key players of this match.