Julio Velasco ready to discover Paola Egonu
The words of Julio Velasco
Julio Velasco’s Azzurri are ready to make their debut in the second week of competition of the Women’s Volleyball Nations League, scheduled in Macau. In Pool 3 Danesi and her teammates will face France tomorrow, engaged for the first season in the international tournament. The challenge è scheduled for 10 a.m. Italian time.
It will be crucial for the tricolor national team to get a full victory against the transalpine team, considering that for the world ranking a 3-0 success would be worth 2.42 points, while in case of 3-0 or 3-1 it would even drop to 0.01 pt.
On the eve of Italy-France, this is the comment of ct Julio Velasco: “Here in Macau we definitely have a very challenging and at the same time interesting round ahead of us, we will encounter increasing difficulties. Brazil and China are among the best formations in the world, although we do not yet know if the home team will be able to count on Zhu-Ting. Brazil needs no introduction, having said that forò we should not underestimate formations that on paper are less strong than us, such as France. In tomorrow’s match è it is fundamental not to lose sets, then on Thursday we will be engaged against the Dominican Republic, a physical and above all powerful national team in attack. In these first two challenges the goal è to win outright, while the challenges with Brazil and China, on the other hand, will be excellent opportunities to grow and move up a level. In case of at least a win against them would come some heavy points for Olympic qualification, for’regardless of the result, they will be testing tests to understand our condition and become aware of our level of play.
We come to these Macau matches with a let’s say new team, in the sense that the athletes coming from the Champions League Super-Finals have had little time to train and especially we have not played friendlies all together. The fact that we are starting against France will be able to help us find a greater understanding and add those little game mechanisms that surely just one week of working together cannot give you. The hope è is to grow match by match, focusing not so much on the opponents’ game, but on our own volleyball. Analyzing the VNL in general, after the first week I feel I can say that the strongest teams are always the same. Turkey found some problems in the first leg, but they are part of the lot of the best lineups, as are Brazil and China, which started strong instead. The U.S., perhaps, is making less than expected, forò one must take into account the return of director Poulter after a long period of absence. I believe that all the formations need time to find the best condition, although there are national teams that are playing very well and I refer to Japan and Canada, not by chance two national teams that are playing for the Olympic pass like us. At the moment there are not so many, forò a few surprises are è seen”.
