Posted by A final round up of stuff that happened this week. In no particular order and minimal comment from me.
– In final tournament games in Innsbruck, Puerto Rico lost again, this time to China and Iran thrashed Austria. Puerto Rico is a better team than the results of this tournament show. Actually a much better team. There’s not an obvious explanation for these results other than that they don’t count for anything. Sill, losing is rarely good, unless you’re a third pary (eg Australia).
– Germany thrashed Brazil (and here) in the third of their preparation matches. This was obviously a great performance from Germany, even more so without the opposite who has starred for them all summer (Grozer). Germany will be full of confidence going into the group of death.
– Volleywood reported that Brazil had to drop Marlon because of injury and called up Maurizio Latelli to replace him. Volleyball.it reported that Latelli just trained with the team to make up numbers. I’m going to go with volleyball.it on this one, but volleywood wins with the photos of Bernardo on crutches at training.
– Italy pulled a mild surprise by picking Ivan Zaytsev for their last roster spot. It is a surprise because he has played hardly any international volleyball, because he was a setter until 2 years ago, because he has never played as a spiker in A1 and because his father won two world championship titles as the captain of the Soviet Union. The team list and details is here.
– The US team is well prepared but I’m almost certain the coach never actually said his team had a ‘magic mixture’ of anything.
– All the German team matches will be shown live on www.sport1.de. Press release here.
– Egypt beat Piacenza. Really…
– Puerto Rico lost to Innsbruck. Really.
I don’t know how to write the two completely different ‘really’s’ that ended the last two notes.
– China did beat Innsbruck.
– Canada beat Bled.
– Russia visited the Ferrari factory.
I guess I’m running out of steam…
Just two more…
– Killshot is the name of a blogging portal that will be running through the tournament. ‘Six bloggers, five countries, one passion.’ Only one in English though.
– All matches will be shown on Raisport.tv. The only problem with this one is that previous matches have been restricted to Italian viewers. Time to dust off the proxy IP addresses. Or maybe they’ll be open to all.
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