The journey ends in the quarter-finals of Italy in the Volleyball Nations League by virtue of the defeat suffered today at the Beilun Sport and Arts Centre with the score of 0-3 (22-25, 21-25, 21-25) against the United States, one of the best teams in the world. For this match, coach de Giorgi fielded a diagonal composed of Giannelli-Romanò, Lavia and Bottolo as spikers, Mati and Sanguinetti as centers, and Balaso as libero. The Azzurri were unable to express their best game, and on the other hand, the Americans were good in all the fundamentals and with a serve that put Italy in great difficulty. There is certainly regret for this setback, which came after three weeks in which the Azzurri had obtained three victories in Ottawa (week 1), two in Ljubljana (week 2), and three in Osaka (week 3). In the intercontinental phase, the Azzurri had beaten the United States (3-2) in the match played last June 15 at the TD Place Arena in Ottawa.
Sorry coach Ferdinando De Giorgi: “"The United States deserves our compliments because they played a very intense match and generally played well. We, however, despite the difficulties this match presented, didn't perform as we wanted. We conceded too much on reception, conceding too many aces and half-points. On offense, however, we held our own, even looking at the stats, but we were clearly penalized by our team's reception performance. This is perhaps the first time we've conceded such a high number of points. It's certainly a shame, because it takes a lot of effort to get this far, and we would have liked to have performed better. We have the key event of this season ahead of us, the European Championships, so aside from this moment of disappointment, we'll draw a line under our belts to keep things positive."”
“"Today's result doesn't ruin the journey we've made to get to the Finals. It was a long VNL, played with a lot of players, and I think it can be summed up as a good achievement." he said Luca Porro. “We are truly so sorry – he added Yuri Romanò – because we were here to do much better and we believed in it a lot. We will learn from this defeat. We'll restart from the path we've taken. We played this competition with many athletes and many young players, who demonstrated great value. We'll start again with the whole group to best prepare for the European Championship, which is particularly important to us.".
