50? No problem

Cignal knew that nothing was going to be easy in the PVL Reinforced Conference quarterfinals.

But it was determined to go all the way and not let anything stop it in its tracks—not even a 50-point performance from Capital1’s Marina Tushova that broke her own league scoring record.

“We had a good standing [in the preliminaries] so we were not going to allow [Capital1 to beat us] in this knockout game,” Riri Meneses said in Filipino.

Meneses had 21 points and seven blocks as she was among those who took on the role of trying to contain Tushova in the HD Spikers’ 25-19, 36-34, 16-25, 22-25, 15-12 victory Saturday at Filoil EcoOil Centre to punch a ticket to the semifinals.

“I don’t know what to say [about defending Tushova] because no matter what we did she still had 50 points,” Meneses said, laughing. “This is another record so I am just thankful that even if she broke another record we still won.”

‘Keep positive’

Cignal was coming into the quarterfinals as the second-seeded team with a 7-1 card. But what should have been a lopsided win on paper turned into a full-blown slugfest.

A lot of that was because of Tushova, the Russian scoring machine who kept the Solar Spikers in play despite going down, 2-0, after dropping a hard-fought second set.

“[Give] credit to [Capital1], especially [Tushova], who was really difficult to play against,” Cignal coach Shaq delos Santos said. “No matter how much effort we put in [defensively], once she gets momentum, she is going to score.”

But the HD Spikers expected nothing less from the rising crew as they knew what threat Tushova posed. And MJ Perez, despite not matching her Capital1 counterpart’s output, was not about to be reduced to an afterthought. She provided her squad with 34 points and a lot of motivation.

“Tushova is a great player. She’s good, she’s very smart. Of course, in my position, I’m the import of this team, I have to bounce back every time, every chance, it was hard,” the Venezuelan said. “But, I keep positive because we have the whole team … This is all about teamwork. So that’s why I was keeping very positive.”

“I never thought that we were gonna lose. My mind was always positive, I was thinking all the time and praying all the time that this is our game. And I was telling the girls … talking to them the whole game, ‘this is ours, this is ours,’” Perez added.

She’ll need a lot more doses of that positivity as things are about to get even tougher for Cignal.

Eight-time champion Creamline and defending titlist Petro Gazz clash on Tuesday in their quarterfinal pairing, and the winner will face the HD Spikers in the semifinals.

It’s going to be a testy challenge for Cignal either way. “My feeling is that the job here is not done. We still have a job to do and this is the first step, and we knew that it was not gonna be easy,” Perez added.

“We knew that it was gonna be difficult and we saw it. But now, we have to keep our target and still this is not our main target. Our main target is to try to be in the finals.”

“I’m happy and proud of the team because no matter what happened [in the game], we overcame our struggles and we got the win,” delos Santos said. “That’s the most important thing for us.”