Two sets are enough to rejoice: Novara wins the Cev Cup
Igor Novara won the 2024-2025 edition of the women’s Cev Cup, the second-largest continental tournament after the Champions League. The girls coached by Lollo Bernardi, victorious 3-1 in the first leg of the final against Romania’Alba-Blaj, needed only to win at least two sets to guarantee the final success, and the success came in the first two fractions, won with the partials of 30-28 and 25-17.
The momentum of pride of the Alba-Blaj led to try to shorten the distance in the third fraction, but on 14-11 for the Romanian Novara picked up the pace, going on to close the accounts on 28-26 thus legitimizing, even more clearly, the final success, which came after beating, in a row, the Polish dell’LKS, the Turks of Kuzeyboru, the Bulgarians of Marica and another Turkish team, Turk Hava Yollari, before reaching the final against Alba-Blaj.
From a statistical point of view, the 22 points scored in the first two sets by Tatiana Tolok, who remained on the bench in the third fraction but still was the match’s top scorer, weighed in no small part. For coach Bernardi, who as a player was one of the members of the Generation of Phenomena capable of winning everything, it is the first Cev Cup as a coach, after the four men’s cups won as a player in the 1990-91, 1992-93, 1997-98 (all three in Treviso) and 2004-05 (at Lube) seasons.
For AGIL Volley Novara, it is the third continental triumph, the first in the Cev Cup (in 2003 it was Asystel Novara that won it), coming after the Champions won in 2019 and the Challenge Cup entered in the trophy cabinet at the end of last season, the latter always with Bernardi on the bench. An event, by the way, in which Novara participated thanks to the victory, in the fall of 2023, of the Wevza Cup, a competition that puts up for grabs precisely a place in the third European cup.
