Chris McHugh and Damien Schumann gave an inspired performance in their Olympic debut, going down in an incredibly tight match 21-18, 18-21, 15-13 to world number one duo Anders Mol and Christian Sorum of Norway.
The Aussie duo played a fearless match, with neither the magnitude of the Olympic stage or the pedigree of their Norwegian opponents aweing McHugh and Schumann.
The Australians showed they were up for the challenge from the start, with McHugh matching hitting power with the Norwegians and Schumann everywhere in the backcourt. With the Norwegian duo dominant at the net on the World tour, McHugh and Schumann showed an array of attacks, with power hitting from Schumann, varying their attack to hit on second and jump sets to put the Norwegians out of place in defence.
Going almost point for point in first set until 14-all, the Norwegians pulled off two points in succession to get the slight edge they would hold onto to take it 21-18.
McHugh and Schumann came out firing in the second, launching to a 12-4 lead showing complete control of the court. Mol and Sorum began to assert their dominance at the net, using their height advantage for some big blocks to bring it back to within two at 16-18.
The Australians held their nerve to close out the set 21-18 and send it to a decider.
The pair again showed no nerves and didn’t pull any punches swinging well and taking it to 11-all with a huge upset on the minds of all Australian fans tuning in. Some big net coverage by the Norwegians cruelled the chances of the Aussies, who saved a match point at 14-12 before going down 15-13.
“Today we’re just focusing ourselves on what we’ve been through to get here,” McHugh said, “We've been in pretty much three weeks of quarantine and had a week to training to come in and prepare for this.
“So we're just happy to be able to walk around the village and see other people and we're just really happy to be here in Tokyo - a big thank you to the Tokyo people for having us.
It’s a time in in the world where people really coming together through sport, and we just hope that we provided some happiness to some people in Australia.”
“We do this for the love of sport, the passion, and you know, I know for the guy next to me [Damien] and my family back home. We just want to make people proud of us and show that guys from Australia can compete in on the world tour and stick it to the best.”
Schumann said he was proud of how they played but it was still difficult to end up on the losing side after such a tight match, “They’re the best team in the world and they don’t have many weaknesses, we knew we just have to give everything we have,” Schumann said. “It comes off or it doesn't, that’s how we competed with them tonight and there was only one or two points in it.
“We haven't played on the world tour for a while with travel restricted but I think an Olympics is like almost a level playing field again - everyone's a little bit nervous and you can see that in other matches and other sports as well.”
McHugh said they looked as coming up against the world number one as an opportunity.
“I think you can look at it two ways - you can look at it and be very subservient, or you can look at it is a great opportunity and I think we came out tonight ass a great opportunity for us to put our hearts on the line and our game style on the line. We're so disappointed that we didn't get over line, but we take a lot from this game and we'll take into Monday against Russia.”
The pair have put the rest of their pool on notice with tonight’s performance, and will take on world number 12 ranked Konstantin Semenov and Ilya Leshukov from the Russian Olympic Committee on Monday 26 July at 4pm AEST.
