14/12/2016 20:22
Dinamo MOSCOW make up for slow start to beat Romanian champs
2017 CEV Volleyball Champions League - Women
Moscow, Russia, December 14, 2016. On Wednesday Dinamo MOSCOW started their journey in the 2017 edition of the CEV Volleyball Champions League – Women cruising to a 3-1 victory (23-25, 25-19, 25-21, 25-14) over Romania’s national champions CS Volei Alba BLAJ.
The main goal set by the Muscovites is to make it through the group stage and progress to the Playoffs 6 after they by-passed the previous rounds of the revamped competition. This is not going to be that easy since no Playoffs 12 will be played this year and only the teams topping the charts of each pool plus the two runners-up with the best score will make it to the next round.
Dinamo coach Yury Panchenko decided to start the match with Anastasia Bavykina and Yana Shcherban, and with the recently signed Serbian spiker Aleksandra Crncevic sitting on the bench. The Romanian team caught a very promising start to the match and with the help of Nneka Onyejekwe and Samara Rodrigues brought the first set to a happy end at 25-23.
However, the course of the game changed in the second set where Dinamo stabilised their reception – their success rate improved to 59% - and as a result they improved their performance at attacking and blocking as well, with Nataliya Goncharova and Maja Poljak scoring nine and five points, respectively. Panchenko also changed starting setter Ekaterina Kosianenko for Vera Vetrova and this helped the home side pretty much too.
Dinamo continued to play the same way also in the third set where Vetrova was able to orchestrate their game even better and with Shcherban scoring the most points for the hosts (25-21). The fourth set was fairly one-sided and everything went just easy for the Muscovites who closed the match with a compelling 25-14 win.
Yury Panchenko, head coach of Dinamo, said: “We failed in the first set where it looked like the Romanians knew everything about us and we could not find a way to surprise them.”
Home star Nataliya Goncharova said: “We should thank Vera Vetrova because she really changed our game today and she was an extremely valuable player for the team, I think she would deserve the award for the MVP if there was any such prize tonight. This year we seem to lack consistency but I hope we can improve with every match we play. We know we have to stand the challenge brought by Volero; we watched their match yesterday in Krasnodar and saw how strong they are. I hope that everything will be just fine.”
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