Poland is will host the EuroVolley 2021 final on 20^th September, and their home team will intend to be there.  Team Polska played their first match in the tournament in TAURON Arena against the national team of Portugal.   The current World Champions and bronze medal winner of the last European Championship, were the undisputed favorites of this game and, by playing well mainly in block and the serving fields, easily made it to the victory in the opening set (25-16).

What could have surprised the five thousand plus strong crowd who came to Kraków to support their team, is that after quite an undemanding opening of the game, the players of Vital Heynen’s team were not able to build any safe point advantage in set 2, and in the end lost their effectiveness in attack.  This was jumped on by Portugal who pushed through to win 25-22 and tie the match.

The co-hosts of EuroVolley came back into the game in the third set and from the beginning kept the situation under control (10-5), mainly by reducing the amount of their own errors, while Portugal started to make more (9 in the set).  Their 70% percent of effective reception was not enough to fight for the victory, so the third got taken over by the Polish team (25-16).

The fourth part of the game was the “to be or not to be” moment for the Portuguese team, who would have needed to make it to go to a tie-break.  Poland was not eager to play the additional set and safely controlled the last (14-10). The time-out and changes requested by the head coach of the opponent, Hugo Silva, did not bring any improvement and so the match ended with three-points victory of the Poles (25-19).