In the first half of July, the Croatian volleyball players hosted the Argentine national team in Zadar, for whom this was the last check before the performance at the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Now, last week, in Cluj, Romania, as part of the preparations for the European Championship, which starts for our girls on August 19 with a match against Switzerland in Visnjik, the Croatian national team played four preparatory matches, in five days, with the home team.
Upon her return from Romania, middle blocker Beta Dumančić shared her impressions of these friendly matches:
„These matches have shown a lot about our qualities but also some shortcomings, which we still have to work on before the start of our Zadar Group C of the European Championship. We played four games in Romania and the win-loss ratio is 2-2. We can get a lot of good things out of meeting a very good team from Romania. Although we don’t have much time left until the European Championship, I think we are on the right track and we just need to finish some little things in our game for which a few training sessions are enough, because we are all extremely motivated before this championship.“
Lucija Mlinar, her colleague who plays as a receiver, added:
„Apart from those four training matches, we did several very good trainings in Romania, and I think that was a great preparation for everything that awaits us at the European Championship. Coach Daniele Santarelli rotated the whole team a lot, and there were better and worse things in our game. But in general, these meetings helped us a lot and we learned a lot from them. The focus was on how to play what they should look like and what our goal is at the European Championships, so highly motivated we can’t wait for the competitions to start.“
