Baden, Austria, June 15, 2017. The first two legs of women’s pool play got the 2017 CEV U22 Beach Volleyball European Championship presented by SPORT.LAND.NÖ started on Thursday at the crowded Strandbad Baden complex and produced some interesting results on the sands of the unusually hot Lower Austria.
In Pool A, 17th-seeded Romanians Adriana-Maria Matei and Beata Vaida managed to upset both the top-seeded Austrians Sophie Weber and Marilena Preiml and the 16th-seeded Ukrainians Viktoria Lysytsia and Kateryna Dashevska with 2-0 shutouts, securing their spot in the elimination rounds. With the two Romanians getting to an impressive fifth-place finish at the 2016 FIVB World Championship and in 2017 already becoming regulars on the FIVB World Tour, these victories on the sand in Baden hardly come to anyone’s surprise.
“The first match was a little hard, because it was our first game of the day and we had to get used to the competition and the conditions,” Adriana-Maria Matei commented at the end of the day. “I think it is a good group for us. Tomorrow we will play against Poland and we hope to finish the pool on top of the standings.”
In addition to Romania’s Matei and Vaida, ten more pairs managed to gain two victories on Thursday to secure advancement beyond the pool stage – one each from Belarus, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey and two from Germany. With the exception of Austria’s Weber and Preiml, all teams from the top seven seeds are among them. Much to the disappointment of the enthusiastic home fans, none of the three Austrian duos managed to win a match on the first competition day.
There were five three-setters among the 32 women’s games played on Thursday. In what was the longest match of the day, Spain’s María Belén Carro Márquez de Acuña and Clara Soler Alcocer, seeded 23rd, and Italy’s 10th-seeders Gaia Traballi and Federica Frasca delivered 56 minutes of excitement to the fans, with the Spaniards eventually persevering for a 2-1 (21-19, 16-21, 15-13) victory.
Friday’s programme includes the last leg of pool play, which will determine the final standings in the eight pools and all the teams advancing to the elimination rounds scheduled for Saturday.
All matches of the tournament on courts 1 and 2 are scheduled for live streaming on LAOLA1.tv.
Engage with the U22 European Championship on social media by using the competition’s official hashtag #EuroBeachVolleyU22.
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