Team Portugal resume EuroVolley qualifiers with medium-term goals
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Team Portugal has travelled to Tbilisi, Georgia to contest later this week the second round robin tournament scheduled for Pool B of the CEV EuroVolley 2021 Women Qualifiers. This past weekend in Matosinhos, Sweden beat both Portugal and Ukraine to claim provisional top spot in the group.
Team Portugal head coach João José, a former international Volleyball star, has taken some good lessons from the matches played in Matosinhos:
“When we started our participation in this competition, we did not have a lot of knowledge about our opponents, mainly because the stop in international competition dictated by the pandemic caused changes - sometimes huge ones for some teams. Thus, we chose to focus on building our team, moulding it to a certain way of playing and creating our own identity. "
"After the 1st tournament, we now have some knowledge of Ukraine and Sweden and their way of play, but we will continue to follow our strategy, because we believe that this is the right path and that it can help us achieve results and victories more in the medium term.”
Even though she is still 24 only, Eliana Durão is already an experienced player. A member of the national team in all age groups, she plays for Leixões SC, the winners of this year’s national cup. She was the playmaker of Team Portugal this past weekend in Matosinhos.
Eliana Durão“We are aware that this group is under construction and that it is natural that the victories do not come consistently in this initial phase. With this in mind, we finished the first weekend aware that our performance is not just two defeats."
Setter of Portugal
"In the match against Ukraine, we started, in the first such match as a team, to build our identity, but we lacked the necessary calmness to close the sets. Against Sweden, on the other hand, we presented a better level and surprised the opponent, even though we made many unforced errors. With the group’s dedication, we will become mentally stronger from match to match. I believe that our greatest strength is, without a doubt, the unity of the group and the collective thinking in each action that we do. We work for each other and try to translate that into our game. As our coach says, we are dissatisfied with what we have shown this far and I think that this is our greatest asset for future success.”