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The last match of Pool A took place in the TAURON Arena in Kraków was held between the national teams of Greece and Portugal. Neither of them had already confirmed its advancement to the 1/8 finals. The Greeks needed a 3-0 or 3-1 victory in order to continue in the competition, while any other result would mean it was Portugal.

With both teams fighting, the match was tied straight from the beginning (10-10). Portugal, as well as Greece, had built and then lost a two-point advantage several times and both head coaches requested time-outs in a very short period of time. In the end it was Portugal who kept a cool head in the key moment and got one step closer to qualifying to the eighth finals.

Greece seemed to be incapable of playing under the growing pressure and started the second set with a four-point deficit (2-6). The emotion in the venue resulted in yellow cards presented by the referee. Even though Portugal at that point was already on the best way to seal its ticket to Gdańsk (17-13), in the last moment the Hellas managed to somehow defeat them, thanks to a spectacular run of serves by their team captain, Georgios Petreas (26-24).

As the previous part still did not bring any settlement, in the third set the teams fought hard point-for-point (13-13). In the most decisive moment the players of Hugo Silva’s team managed to settle an extremely important point advantage (19-15), and by winning this part, checked-in to the next phase of the tournament (25-20) in Gdansk.

Although the final result did not have any impact on who advances anymore, Greece wanted to say good bye to Kraków in a worthy way. After securing a few-points advantage (16-11), quite surprisingly they lost it as fast as they had built it (22-19) and as a consequence got defeated in the match as well (22-25).