The seventh return match showcased a Yuasa Battery with the proverbial seven lives, capable of suffering in a PalaSanFilippo with over 1000 supporters from Brescia in tow, but also of overturning a match that seemed to most to be marked, with an attitude and a “ringworm” really a great team.
A day which, moreover, also experienced many surprises, largely subverting the predictions for more than one protagonist of the noble parts of the ranking: just think of the slips of Prata and Cuneo at home of the last of the class, Ortona and Castellana Grotte respectively . In a round in which, potentially, the most aggressive pursuers of the Yuasa Battery should have and could have nibbled at some lengths, instead the gap remained, at most, unchanged. In fact, Siena, second on the eve tied with Cuneo, won in Ravenna in the fifth set, effectively emulating what Yuasa did in Brescia and therefore keeping their gap on the Marches unchanged. For all the others (with the exception of Porto Viro which however is still 14 points away), the gap from the top has grown further.
But returning to what happened in Lombardy, the formation fielded by Zambonardi saw Tiberti redistribute many balls to the Gavilan and Cominetti hammers which usually ended up being resolved by Klapwijk, who was not at his best yesterday. The excellent verve of the two side players, however, largely made up for the limited use of the Flying Dutchman, putting a Yuasa Battery in great difficulty who in the first two sets, on the other hand, really struggled to put the ball on the ground.
Yet the start was not as bad as on other occasions (for example eight days earlier in Pordenone), as the coach Massimiliano Ortenzi himself admitted: “In the first set, in my opinion, we beat very well, and also in the block-defense phase we done well, but in counterattack we couldn’t put the ball down. We had many opportunities but we weren’t able to exploit them, and so everything became complicated. In the second Brescia played really well, they put us under. In the third the game changed, we found a little more rhythm and efficiency and from there we played very well. Fourth and fifth we played a great volume of play.”
