Italian club beats Germans in the prelims of 2012 CEV Volleyball Champions League
MC-Carnaghi Villa Cortese of Italy edged out Schweriner SC of Germany in the prelims of the 2012 CEV Volleyball Champions League. The match was played on Tuesday, December 6 at the Pala Borsani in Castellanza. The two women’s teams fought for 92 minutes
and the Italians emerged as winners. They made a great come-back after losing the very first set in the match and posted a 3-1 (21-25, 25-21, 25-17, 25-15) victory over the opponent.
MC-Carnaghi came up with the right strategy to win the match and highlighted its chances to make it out of Pool play.
In opening set of the match, SCHWERINER SC showed good fighting spirit. They threw some heavy serves and sparked problems across MC-Carnaghi’s defence. Germans led the scores by 6-2 at the first technical timeout. Italians shortened the gap of points to
13-12 at the second technical break and managed to take the lead at 19-16. Nonetheless, Krystle Esdelle of Germany hit back strongly and notched four aces in a row, which totally changed the direction of the set. SCHWERINER SC retook the lead and finished
off first set 25-21.
After the loss of early set, home team of Italy started the hard hitting. They regrouped the player-positions and struggled to break the tempo of Germans. Likewise, the charged-up German girls were not ready to give up so easily. They staged a good fight
and score soared up with close gaps. At the first technical timeout, there was only a single-point difference in the scores of two teams. Afterwards, the game of hit and run continued until the end of second set. Eventually, Italians clawed their way to victory
by returning the same score of 25-21 over Germany.
In the next two sets, Italians surprised the German team by opting for many fast attacks. They remained remarkably consistent and captured both sets, 25-17, 25-15. Eventually, Italy sailed to the final 3:1 and bagged three points from this home game.
Italian MC-Carnaghi’s middle blocker, Federica Stufi, was named Most Valuable Player (MVP) of match due to her exceptional performance on the centre court. She was one of the four rookies of Italian team and finished the game by registering 8 blocks. She
was more than happy to receive the MVP award and disclosed her thoughts after the match. She stated: “We are very happy but actually it is a win we had reckoned with. They took many risks in serving and put us under pressure; however, we changed our mental
approach and then everything went well”.
Teun Buijs, the mentor of German team, said: “We have a very young team so we pay the price for our limited experience. We are nevertheless quite satisfied even though we have to improve for the future”.
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