Thessaloniki, Greece, August 27, 2016. Brothers Angelos and Vasileios Mandilaris saved the day for hosts Greece at the CEV U22 Beach Volleyball European Championship, as they cruised through the quarter-finals of the men’s competition, before eventually losing and settling for a quite remarkable fifth place.
In front of former Greek Volleyball and Beach Volleyball legends, such as three-time Olympian Vasso Karadasiou and the former captain of the Greek men’s national team Michalis Triantafyllidis, the Mandilaris brothers had a busy day at Avant Garde Sports Club, where they won two games in a row to advance to the Round of 16 and later on to the quarter-finals.
Carried by the help of the enthusiastic crowd, they managed to turn things around against Italian duo Giacomo De Fabritiis/Paolo Di Silvestre and beat them in the tiebreak thanks to an 8-1 streak, which gave them the final 15-11 victory.
Nevertheless, they couldn’t match the level of Ukrainian Oleh Plotnytskyi/Denys Denysenko, who beat them in the quarter-finals (21-15, 21-11). The Ukrainians did the same earlier in the Round of 16 with another Greek team, Rafail Baniotis/Georgios Terzoglou (21-19, 21-17).
The third Greek pair, formed by Iason Kanellos/Vasileios Zisis, wasn’t that lucky on day 3 as Zisis suffered a back injury during their match against Serbians Djordje Klasnic/Ivan Lozic and had to withdraw while they were leading 1-0.
Another interesting battle was the one between Spaniards Alejando Huerta/Oscar Jiménez and Germans Julius Thole/Eric Stadie in the Round of 16. Besides beautiful Volleyball their coaches brought a lot of glory and good memories to the game: Javier Bosma, silver Olympic medallist in Athens 2004 with Pablo Herrera and Jörg Ahmann, bronze medallist in Sydney 2000 with Axel Hager, were in attendance. The first one saw his pupils win in straight sets and advance to the quarter-finals.
In the women’s competition, all Greek teams suffered a defeat. Dimitra Manavi/Ioanna Parisaki finished ninth in the final ranking, the best result for a Greek team in Thessaloniki, even though it wasn’t quite as good as they expected, after their unbeaten run in Pool A.
The European Championship will conclude on Sunday with the semi-finals in the morning, starting at 11:00 local time, and the finals in the afternoon.
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