World Water Polo Championships, no medal for Settebello: race stops at quarterfinals
It stops at the quarterfinals the race to the medals of Italy in the World Water Polo Championships being held in Singapore: the Settebello, in fact, yields to Greece 17-11 and will have to settle for fighting for fifth place. Fatal, for the Azzurri, were the first two quarters, which saw the Hellenes lead 9-2: a gap too difficult to regain in the third and fourth periods of play, which ended with partials of 4-4 and 5-4 for Italy.
As for the scorers for the national team coached by Sandro Campagna, there are on the scoreboard three goals by Lorenzo Bruni and two each for Francesco Di Fulvio, Edoardo Di Somma and Francesco Cassia. In contrast, Luca Damonte and Giacomo Cannella scored one goal each. In goal, fourteen goals were conceded by Gianmarco Nicosia, while three were taken by Tommaso Baggi Necchi.
Greece, led poolside by Theodoros Vlachos, was instead dragged along by Stylianos Argyropoulos Kanakakis’s poker, as well as Aristeidis Chalyvopoulos’s three goals, by the doubles of Kostantinos Genidounias, Efstathios Kalogeropoulos and Dimitrios Nikolaidis, and by the individual goals scored by Dimitrios Skoumpakis, Nikolaos Gkillas, Kostantinos Kakaris and Evangelos Pouros.
Italy, then, will not be able to replicate the result achieved in Qatar in 2024, when the Settebello climbed all the way to the final only to have to settle for silver following defeat against Croatia on penalties. Thus, Italy’s list of medals at the men’s World Cup is not updated: four golds (1978, 1994, 2011 and 2019), as many silvers (1986, 2003, 2022 and 2024), one bronze medal, in 1975.
