06/07/2018 23:00
Silic and Pribanic vie for success on home sand at 1-Star Poreč Satellite
2018 CEV Beach Volleyball Satellite - Poreč
Poreč, Croatia, July 6, 2018. The 1-Star event in Poreč continued on Friday with the early stages of the men’s and women’s Main Draw, featuring as many as four Croatian teams per gender. In the men’s tournament, Josip Pribanic and Filip Silic were the only home side to claim a victory and they did so in style as they shut out Slovenia’s Gasper Plahutnik and Sergej Drobnic 21-9, 21-12 in 22 minutes only. On Saturday, they will vie for first place in their pool when playing Kristaps Smits and Mihails Samoilovs of Latvia.
Silic is one of Croatia’s best and most successful Beach Volleyball players. This season he is playing with a new partner, Josip Pribanic. “I started the season with Ivan Djordjevic but he eventually got the opportunity to coach our women’s team and since he is focussing pretty much on a coaching career, he accepted that offer with my full support. The next option was to play with Pribanic and it has been going extremely well since we started working together a couple of months ago. Djordjevic and I played together for a year and we competed at last year’s Major Series here in Poreč as well. Previously, I played for a long time with Ivan Zeljkovic. As for my partnership with Pribanic, this season we played at the 1-Star event in Baden, Austria and on the national tour as well – finishing first and third in Novalja and Umag, respectively.”
Latvian rising stars Kristaps Smits and Mihails Samoilovs will be the next opponent for home heroes Silic and Pribanic
Pribanic, on the other hand, just returned from the Mediterranean Games held last week in Tarragona, Spain – where he played alongside Marin Jercic. “I started the season with Jercic, but eventually switched to play with Filip Silic. As for the Mediterranean Games, we played a good match with Cyprus, which we lost in three sets before losing to France as well. We eventually lost in the next round to the Italian team [Marco Caminati and Enrico Rossi] that won the silver medal in the end. With Jercic I played Snow Volleyball as well earlier this year, before competing on the World Tour at events in Iran, Oman and Turkey. As for this tournament, our goal is to make it through the group stage and see how far we can get from there,” Pribanic said.
Dimitra Manavi and Konstantina Tsopoulou of Greece were among the teams progressing straight to the quarterfinals of the women’s competition in Poreč
Men’s pool play will end on Saturday morning. The women’s pool phase finished on Friday already, with four teams securing their spot in the quarterfinals. These are Austria’s Eva Freiberger/Valerie Teufl, Greece’s Dimitra Manavi/Konstantina Tsopoulou, Turkey’s Merve Nezir/Aleyna Vence and USA’s Emily Sonny/Torrey Van Winden.
Click here for further information.
|