25/08/2017 02:40
Serbian stars over the moon after 3-0 victory in EUROVOLLEY Opening Match
2017 CEV Volleyball European Championship - Men
Warsaw, Poland, August 25, 2017. On Thursday night, Serbia stole the show from hosts Poland as the visitors rallied to a comprehensive 3-0 victory over a record-breaking crowd of 65,407 fans at PGE National Stadium to start their #EuroVolley campaign in emphatic style. It was a truly memorable night for European Volleyball – and it will go down in history for setting an all-time record of attendance and for delivering a real ‘Volleyball experience’ in terms of entertainment and fan engagement.
The players of the Serbian national team were obviously happy with the result. “Honestly, I did not expect Poland would perform at such a high level. It was a real show, and they surrendered only to our good game. Anyway, this is just the result of one match,” outside hitter Nemanja Petric said. “It was a show, something people definitely enjoyed to watch, but from the point of the view of a player it was only one match of a much longer tournament. We are obviously happy, because the match was an important one, but we have to clear our heads and take it one game at a time from now on. It is not easy to play in a football stadium but the conditions were the same for both teams.”
Serbia setter Nikola Jovovic, who produced one of the greatest actions of the night, was elated as well. “To be honest that was not an easy match, because the final result is 3-0 but we had to work hard for this. Every time we were up by three or four points, they always came back. In the end, we won, but honestly, we were expecting to play five sets.”
“Three years have passed and still our Polish friends are making fun of us because of the match we lost three years ago,” Marko Podrascanin said referring to the opening game of the 2014 Worlds, which also took place at PGE National Stadium. “We are all friends and the conditions are the same for everyone. Luckily, we managed to start the match in a good way, we had a good start and our good performance in block and defence helped us achieve this result. We usually play well in attack and when we add good defence and block, we can achieve a result like tonight’s 3-0 victory against an opponent as strong as Poland.”
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