Luxembourg, January 13, 2021. After a first match day in Israel, the host of the EuroVolley 2021 Men Pool B Qualifiers, that saw Austria win against Israel in a highly disputed encounter, the stage is ready for team Bulgaria to enter the run for a spot at the Final Tournament as they face Austria on the day. 

Leading the team from the bench is Silvano Prandi, back for his second spell as head coach of the Bulgarian national team, none other than the person that lead them to their last EuroVolley medal in 2009 – Turkey, when they managed to get bronze.
The highly experienced Bulgarians are widely regarded as the favourites of Pool B after failing to achieve automatic qualification following a loss against Slovenia in the Round of 16 (1:3) that saw them occupy an unconvincing 11th place at the last Eurovolley in 2019. 

Known not to shy away from giving a chance to young Bulgarian talents, Prandi’s team differs substantially from the one that took part in the Olympic Qualifiers a year ago. Thus, there are four newcomers on the international stage, Asparuh Asparuhov (Verona), Dimitar Dimitrov (CSKA), Stefan Chavdarov (Montana) and Aleksandar Nikolov (Levski Sofia). However, all eyes will be on their superstar captain, Tsvetan Sokolov who had recently joined the team after winning the Russian Cup with Dinamo Moscow.

On the other side of the net, Austria will be feeling confident after a solid display in the opening day and will be hoping that their top scorer Alexander Berger will be again in fine form. “We had good conditions at home and worked well. Now I hope that we can show an even better performance against Bulgaria as well as in the second game against Israel. Our goal is clear: we want to qualify - as quickly as possible. Yesterday with Israel we did some things well. Nevertheless, we had to talk with the team because there were two or three things that were not quite okay, but which we can certainly do better,” said Radovan Gacic, head coach of Team Austria.