Antwerp, Belgium, 17 Jun, 2017 – Home side Belgium beat Italy 3-1 on Saturday, knocking the visitors out of the 2017 FIVB World League Final Six contention.
Vital Heynen (head coach, Belgium): “We dragged ourselves through our game of today. We made a huge step forward in order to reach the Final 6. Yesterday it seems so far away, today we are closer to our goal. Now the game against France will be important, we dream about the competition in Brazil.”
Pieter Verhees (player, Belgium): “We wanted to prove to our fans that we are playing a very good competition so far. After the defeat yesterday against Canada, the home crowd gave us a fantastic support. This summer our goal was to play the Final 6. It would be the first time for Belgium and we want to achieve that, despite a busy summer. It is a big challenge and we look forward to going to Brazil. Tomorrow we have one more possibility to qualify for the Final 6.”
Bram Van den Dries (player, Belgium): “It was clear that we had to pull ourselves together after the game of yesterday. We showed a different mentality. We need everybody of our group, because we have a tough campaign.”
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Media GuidesGianlorenzo Blengini (head coach, Italy): “Of course, this defeat is a disappointment. It was difficult to recover from losing our advantage in the second set, and we should have done better after saving a match point in set three. But in the fourth set we made too many technical errors in order to threaten the Belgians. Now we cannot qualify for the Final 6 anymore, but we knew that would be a very complex task because we had a difficult program. Unfortunately we lost key player Lanza in an early stage of the competition.”
Iacopo Botto (player, Italy): “After Friday’s victory against France, we had expected to show a much better performance against Belgium, since we still had a chance to qualify for the Final 6. Therefore this defeat is disappointment. All credit to Belgium. They showed a very good level and they caused us to have difficulties in reception. The World League will end for us tomorrow and we could have done better, but we’re working with new, young players, so it takes some time to experience what the high level of this World League means.”
Saturday schedule:
