Radovan Gacic nie może się doczekać międzynarodowego debiutu w reprezentacji Austrii [ENG]
Federation News
Vienna, Austria, January 11, 2021. Team Austria will start their quest for a spot to compete at this year’s CEV EuroVolley 2021 Men on Tuesday with a matchup against the hosts of Pool B, Israel. This fixture will coincide with the international debut of Radovan Gacic (pictured) at the helm of the Austrian national team.
Looking at the international rankings, Austria and Israel should deliver a rather close match. Israel sit in 58th place in the latest FIVB rankings, with Austria slightly further down in 62nd place. If we are looking at the European rankings, Austria and Israel currently occupy the 25th and 28th spots, respectively.
Despite this, Gacic assumes that “we have the better team and can beat them twice”, even though he believes that with their teamwork and collective effort Israel may cause a surprise at their home tournament.
Gacic is yet to lead Austria at any international match since the coronavirus pandemic halted competition for most of 2020. The 45-year-old Slovene took over the Austrian national team in February 2020 as the successor to Michael Warm. Warm had worked with Team Austria for as many as nine years, taking it to unprecedented success. Austria qualified for the very first time for the EuroVolley Final Round in 2019 and a bronze medal from the 2016 edition of the CEV European League is another milestone to remember from his long tenure at the helm of the team.
Gacic’s first goal is obviously to qualify for EuroVolley for the second straight edition. As he said back in 2020, when taking over the reins of the team, if Austria manage to achieve this goal, their next ambition will be to perform well at EuroVolley 2021. Such a journey begins on Tuesday with the first of two matches with Israel.
Radovan Gacic“I am sure that we can take another step forward here. Of course, it will be difficult because the preparation has suffered from the constraints resulting from the pandemic, but it was the same for the other teams as well.”
Head coach of Team Austria
Interestingly enough, when Michael Warm made his debut at the helm of Team Austria, Israel was the opponent standing on the other side of the net as well. This was a friendly match ‘only’, and yet the Austrians hope that this will be a good omen, and this applies especially to those who were there at the time, namely captain Peter Wohlfahrtstätter and team manager Christoph Baumgartner.
Team Austria travelled to Israel on Saturday and arrived in the country where a lockdown is currently in place to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. “Practically everything is closed. Outside you can only move in groups of less than five people,” says Austrian Volleyball Federation Sports Director Gottfried Rath-Zobernig. “There are many controls and check-points, as the police have put up road blocks. We hardly ever leave the hotel. Since the fitness studios are closed, we improvised strength training with our machines in the wedding hall of our hotel!”
The CEV EuroVolley 2021 Men will be taking place later this summer in Poland (Katowice, Gdansk, and Krakow), the Czech Republic (Ostrava), Estonia (Tallinn) and Finland (Tampere). The seven group winners and the five best runners-up qualify for the final round joining there the four host countries and the top eight teams from the 2019 edition. Most of the EuroVolley qualifiers will be taking place in early / mid-May due to the coronavirus crisis, with completion of the qualifying process due for May 16, 2021.