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The opening match of Pool A in the men’s European Championship finished with a tie-break victory for team Ukraine, who fought till the end against Greece.  The match went to form as the Greeks ended the 2019 championship in 16^th place, while Ukraine was positioned seventh.

The beginning of the first set was really tied (5:5) and without doubts the one of the brightest starts of team Hellas was the 28-years-old outside spiker Athanasios Protopsaltis, who scored ten points in total just in the first part of the game. His impressive performance helped Greece to build a four points tactical advantage (17-13), and then finally to win in the opening set to 22 points.

In the second set it was also the team of Dimitrios Andreopoulos who took the lead initially, but the Ukrainian players not only made it a tie really fast (10:10), but in the end also won the second set after a challenge, which proved that the ball was in of the serve of Dmytro Viietskyi (26-24).

Third part of the game was the show of Greece’s spiking and blocking power. Even though the Ukrainian team dragged the match back level (16-16), the final stage of the set was fully dominated by the Hellas, who won 25-22.

The players of Ugis Kastins were really determined to stay in the game, so they started to play really hard in the serving field, scoring three aces in this period (12-7), the fourth set was as well the show of the team’s captain Oleh Plotnytskyi, who became the best scorer of his team in the end with 24 points.

The tie-break was absolutely dominated by Ukraine straight from the beginning, who immediately secured a significant advantage (8-2) and kept it easily to the end of the opening game 15-6.