| Belgorod residents beat the most inconvenient opponent In the semi-final match of the “Final Four” of the Volleyball Champions League, the players of the Belgorod “Lokomotiv-Belogorye” defeated the French “Paris Volley” - 3:2 (30:32, 25:23, 24:26, 25:21, 15:10) . The final match ended late yesterday evening, in which Gennady Shipulin's team faced the Italian Modena. The exit of the Belgorod team to the final is a great success in any case, since in Russian history our clubs have never competed in decisive matches of this level in summer team sports.
“They are disgusting, these French teams. They scream like leeches and you can’t shake them off. They accept, they play defense, try to shake them,” these words of the former USSR national team player Alexander Shadchin perfectly sum up what happened on Saturday at the Milan Philaforum arena. A tedious, drawn-out struggle for two hours, and the French, with their tenacity, sometimes brought them to despair. How can we not remember the similar torment of our team in the semi-finals of last year’s World Cup against the same French.
However, our opponents in the semi-finals could be called French only conditionally. Four players from the Canadian national team led by Canadian coach Glenn Hoag, the leader of the Czech national team Jiri Novak and only two Frenchmen in the main seven. This international team plays incredibly well and already won the Champions League a couple of years ago. In addition, Paris Valley is the most inconvenient rival of Belgorod on the continent. These teams met twice on the cup path, and the Russians were unable to win a single game.
This time, we had to wait exactly an hour for the first local success - that’s exactly how long it took the teams to play two games. In the first set, we had four set points, but the opponent showed incredible resilience. And so the whole match. It was possible to achieve a complete turnaround only at the end of the fifth game, and Gennady Shipulin has the right to share this success equally with his students. Firstly, he took an incredible risk when, with the score 18:18 in the fourth game, he decided to replace the “battle-hardened” Alexei Kuleshov with Arkady Kozlov, who had no experience in such fights. And the backup clearly strengthened the team play. Secondly, with the score 12:9 in the decisive set, Shipulin brought Kuleshov back just one rally, and he won the key point with a single block.
“I can barely stand on my feet,” admitted our captain Sergei Tetyukhin after the match, who once again showed off his extraordinary skill. As the game progressed, almost all the players on our team dropped out of the team game for a while, and only Sergei, like an automaton, earned points. In the middle of the fifth game, he could barely rise above the net, but still won his decisive balls.
We could only be glad that our semi-final was played first and a few extra hours of rest, unlike our opponent in the final, looked like a clear advantage. The current draw takes place simultaneously with the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the European Volleyball Confederation. Therefore, in addition to the games themselves, a lot of anniversary events are held here. Among them was a rather exotic match, in which there were 121 volleyball players on each side of the court. It looked very little like volleyball, but it clearly set a record for the Guinness Book.
It’s also pleasant that our support group turned out to be larger than the French one. True, our hundred still fall short of the armada of fans of the Polish “Mostostal”, which clearly numbers more than a thousand “active bayonets”. But in volleyball, not everything is decided by the number of fans. And Gennady Shipulin promised the correspondent of the newspaper “Vremya Novostey” to prove this in the final. Vladimir STETSKO, Milan |
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