Italvolley, Simone Giannelli charges Azzurri for world debut
Minus two days to the debut in the rainbow review for the Men’s National Team, which today held a double work session (weights in the morning and on-court training in the local afternoon).
When the match with Algeria (Sunday at 3:30 p.m. with live TV on Rai 2, DAZN and VBTV) is just over 48 hours away, it was captain Simone Giannelli who told of his feelings: “We are ready, we are happy to be here and have the chance to play our cards in this beautiful event, we are charged up and ready to play this new adventure. Coming here as reigning world champions is a very nice thing, which makes us proud, especially thinking about the fact that, by virtue of the girls’ victory, Italy will be world champions with two teams for a few days! Now for sure the ball is ours and we will be the ones who will have to try to repeat the feat of three years ago by finding the right solutions that can allow us to repeat what we did before, we are aware that it will be really very complicated, but we are here and we want to put all of ourselves into this adventure.”
The blue setter then goes on to talk about the alleged pressure given by the world champions patch placed on the blue jersey: “When we take the court we always feel it beyond the past and the results obtained both positive and negative, I think we just have to be focused and attentive to what we can use now, in this moment and in this event, we will have to be good at understanding what will be necessary to be able to be competitive from start to finish. The patch is a reminder of something beautiful and that no one will ever take away from us, but that is about the past, we have little use for it and we just want to try to accomplish another, historic feat.”
The captain talks about how he and his teammates are doing: “We are doing well, we have done a good path of preparation, with several friendlies between Italy and Japan, I think the path has been the right one. But now we will start playing the matches that count and things will change; I mean other factors and aspects typical of such an important event will come into play.”
Giannelli then closes by talking about the first part of the season: “We made it to the end of the VNL run, something we have never been able to do before, we are happy with that, but a little less happy with how it ended, how we played the final, our goal right now is to hold out a little more against those competitive teams that have been beating us lately. We are aware that we have to battle more, which we were not able to do in the VNL final; on the other hand, however, we also have to consider the fact that we have improved and still achieved a result that we have never achieved before, we are aware of our limits and we know what we lack, so we work every day to improve ourselves knowing that all this wealth of experience will help us.”
