Luxembourg, February 1, 2021. Hosts LKS Commercecon Lodz will take on VakifBank Istanbul in the opening match of the second round-robin tournament in Pool C of CEV Champions League Volley 2021 - Women. At 18:00 local time on Tuesday, at the magnificent Lodz Sport Arena, the top two teams in the current standings will face each other in what could well be the most interesting match of the three-day event in Poland.
The other two sides in the pool, France’s ASPTT Mulhouse and Bulgaria’s Maritza Plovdiv, will join the tournament at 20:30, when they meet in an attempt not to fall behind in the race for the quarterfinal spots. The starting times of the matches on Wednesday and Thursday are the same.
One of the world’s most decorated clubs in the 21st century, three-time club world champions VakifBank of Turkey, arrived in Lodz as the unbeaten leaders of the pool and with the status of heavy favourites. In their three games at the previous tournament in Plovdiv, they lost only a set, to hosts Maritza. Since then, they have also won all nine of their domestic league matches, again losing only a single set along the way, and lead the current standings in Turkey on a 24-1 win-loss record and 72 points, hoping to extend their winning streak to include the three upcoming encounters at the continental level. Historically in the Champions League, VakifBank have won 153 in 208 games and piled up four gold medals, four silvers and a bronze. They have reached the semifinals eight times in a row and 11 times total.
Giovanni Guidetti, head coach of VakifBank Istanbul: "We are very excited to play in the Champions League again. We’ve played only one match for about a month and a half, last week against Besiktas Istanbul. My team miss playing high-level matches; we miss high-level competition. That's why we are very excited to go to Poland. We know we are the best team in the pool, but our opponents play really well. That's why we have to be very careful in every match. It won't be easy to win against LKS. Likewise, it will not be easy to win against Mulhouse and Maritza. But we are very confident in our strength and we look forward to this competition."
Melis Gurkaynak, middle blocker and captain of VakifBank Istanbul: "By winning the first three Champions League matches, we gained an important advantage for going forward. Now we want to keep this advantage in Poland, win the next three games and finish the round as pool leaders."
Poland’s LKS will try to make use of the home court advantage to do even better than they did in Plovdiv, where they started off with a straight-set loss to VakifBank, but picked up speed with a 3-2 win over Maritza and a clean shutout of Mulhouse. They are the only team in the pool that qualified for this stage of the Champions League through the first two rounds of the competition. Between the two tournaments in Pool C, LKS won seven in eight matches of the Polish league improving to 12-6 and moving up to the third place in the current standings. They also won their eighthfinal match for the national cup and advanced to the quarters. The squad from Lodz also underwent a head coach change with Michal Masek back to the club to replace Italy’s Giuseppe Cuccarini in early December. This is LKS’s third Champions League campaign. They finished fourth in their pool in 2019 and third in 2020. Now they hope to make the quarterfinals for the first time in their history.
Michal Masek, head coach of LKS Commercecon Lodz: "We are concentrating on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Now we only have difficult encounters and there are a lot of them, but we are physically prepared. We have been working on it since the beginning of this year. The first matches in January were not the best, but everything was done so that the girls were in good shape and now we can play all games at the highest level."
Magdalena Saad, libero of LKS Commercecon Lodz: "The Champions League is ahead of us. These are three matches, in which we will definitely leave a piece of our heart. We will approach these matches in a way to win, although the final result will be known on Thursday and we will find out if we will advance to the next round. This is always the main goal, but at the moment we are 100% focused on preparation for the tournament and we will see if it will be enough."
The fans are already on the stands at the Lodz Sport Arena
After opening their Champions League campaign with a clean slate over Maritza and then losing to VakifBank and LKS in straight sets, ASPTT Mulhouse are currently ranked third in the pool and hoping to move up the standings over the next three days to save a shot at the quarterfinals. If they succeed, it will be the first time they go beyond the pool stage in nine Champions League campaigns. Since their last game in Bulgaria, Mulhouse have claimed eight wins in nine French league matches to emerge on top of the standings on 14-1. They have also lost their outstanding middle blocker Leandra Olinga-Andela to a serious knee injury and replaced her with experienced Christina Bauer, who returned to the club after 10 years.
Quite the opposite, after losing their first match to Mulhouse in straight sets, Maritza Plovdiv improved their game to push LKS to five and snatch a set from VakifBank. Winless at the bottom of the table, they still hope to do much better in Poland and move up the standings. For the Yellow-and-Blues from Plovdiv, it is the fifth consecutive season in the Champions League, but the Bulgarian champions have never advanced further than the pool stage. Since hosting the first tournament in the pool, they have played only one official match, in which they registered their 100th consecutive domestic league victory in a winning streak that started over five years ago. There has been one change in Maritza’s roster. Outside hitter Silvana Chausheva came back to the team, after her departure in 2017, to replace Desislava Nikolova who underwent foot surgery last month.
Boris Halatchev, team manager of Maritza Plovdiv: “VakifBank are clearly the best team in our pool. We will do our best to give them some hard time and even beat them, if we can. Of course, we are going for the win against the other two opponents as well.”
Zhana Todorova, libero of Maritza Plovdiv: “Every year, the second half of our Champions League season has been better than the first one for us. I hope it will be like that this year too, I hope we achieve two victories.”
All matches in Lodz to be streamed live on EuroVolleyTV.
