Five victories in the group were followed by a painful defeat in the round of 16 against Turkey, the fourth-placed team in Group C. The Turkish women outplayed us 3:1 (25:12, 24:26, 25:13, 25:12) in an hour and 23 minutes of play. In this game, Turkey was better than Croatia in all segments of the game, it can be seen in the result per set and ultimately in the statistics. The Turkish women had a much better attack (46-29), a much better block (16-9), better serving (7-6), and fewer mistakes (19-30).

Ours had a bad start to the game, or more precisely, the Turkish women dictated the pace from the first point. The team of our national team tried minutes of rest, changes, but nothing helped, the Turks outclassed us in that first set, in which we were left without points from the block and with as many as 10 mistakes.

The second set, in which Roso was the organizer of the game instead of Prkačin, did not start better, but at least the Turkish women did not lose significantly in the result. At 11:12, we finally had our first point with a block (Vasilj), and from then on, something broke in our game. The girls started to serve more aggressively, played defense more fanatically, broke through their blocks in the attack and this rewarded them with the first lead in the game with 22:21. Even though they made a lot of mistakes in the end, even though the Turks had a set point, with three points in a row, as a difference, our team won the second set with 26:24 to tie the game at 1-1. Unfortunately, the third and fourth sets were just a copy of the first, and nothing could stop Turkey from a well-deserved victory, which leads them to the group that is fighting from 1st to 8th place, while Croatia will have their next opponent in the Serbian national team on July 11 in the group from 9th to 16th place.

Elector Svetlana Ilić said depressed after the meeting:

This is the hardest thing to do in sports, you give so much of yourself and you don’t manage to materialize it. We have to be honest and congratulate Turkey, who were better than us today, we simply couldn’t match them today. We couldn’t adapt to their physical capabilities. Regardless of everything, I want to praise my team because what they have shown so far deserves to be congratulated, to support them, and to continue. The WC is not over, and now we need to regenerate and return the story, because we decided to always fight until the last one