Paris 2024 Olympics, Caterina Bosetti challenges Serbia
The words of Caterina Bosetti
The Italian women’s national volleyball team will be back on court tomorrow, engaged in the quarterfinals of the Olympic tournament. At 9 p.m. Julio Velasco’s girls will take on Serbia, in a fascinating challenge that has been repeated many times in recent years.
In the Paris Games so far different è has been the path of the two teams, in fact, the Azzurri have collected the first place in the group C and the second in the combined rankings, thanks to the three victories obtained with Dominican Republic, Holland and Turkey.
The world champions, on the other hand, finished third in Pool A (win with France, losses to the United States and China), qualifying for the quarters as the 7th ranked combined.
The teams have faced each other twice this season: in the group stage of the VNL (Fukuoka) victory of the Italian women 3-1 (25-20, 20-25, 25-23, 25-22) and in the last friendly match before the Olympic tournament in Florence with success of Serbia 2-3 (25-21, 20-25, 25-22, 18-25, 9-15).
At the Olympic level, three precedents between the tricolor national team and Serbia: 2008 (Beijing) 3-0 in favor of Italy; 2016 (Rio de Janeiro) 3-0 for Serbia; 2021 (Tokyo) in the quarterfinals victory of the Balkan team 3-0. The winner of this challenge will find whoever wins the challenge between China and Turkey (9 a.m.) in the semifinals, while the other two quarters will feature Brazil – Dominican Republic (1 p.m.) and the United States – Poland (5 p.m.).
For Caterina Bosetti, who was present at both the London and Tokyo Games, this will be the third Olympic quarterfinal, these are her words: “I live this wait very calmly, because I do not want to make the same mistakes of the past Olympics. I think the best thing is to think of tomorrow’s challenge as a match, in quotes, normal. It will be important to take the field calmly and put our potential to good use. We know Serbia very well, a strong team at the wall as they showed in the friendly match in Florence, when they created some difficulties for us, even if at that time we were coming from important workloads and therefore we were not at our best. Their strength is obviously Boskovic: an extraordinary forward that we will have to try to contain, and to do that it will be fundamental to be very orderly on the court. Over the course of the three pool matches we have seen an Italy on the rise, we are a team a little bit like that, in the sense that the more we play together, the more we gear up. This aspect in the VNL had already been noticed, match after match our game è improved and I think the same thing is happening here in Paris as well.
"With the other teammates we often talk about the desire to go all the way to the Olympics, for&grow; at the same time we live it not as an obsession. The arrival of Julio (Velasco ed.) has introduced in the group different keys of interpretation, making us see some things in a different way. For example, we did not live the Olympics with the nagging of going to the finals, but having as a goal one game at a time, first the Dominican, then Holland, Turkey and now on with Serbia This way of thinking allows you to enjoy the moment more and especially a magical competition like the Olympics”.
