If you have read my previous posts, you could’ve already figured out that volleyball is a big part of my life. Since we are now well into the biggest international competition for the sport, I’ve decided to write a few words about it. Even more so because Slovenian national team is also one of the teams at the tournament, and doing really well at this point, but more on that later. This year the competition is held in Italy and Bulgaria, as you can see, and Slovenia is playing in group A, with Italy, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Japan and Belgium.
Let’s first start with some history of the competition itself. The first time FIVB, as the global governing body, organized the event was in 1949, and at the beginning the gap between two championships varied between 3 and 4 years, but in 1962 they decided to change that and fix the gap to 4 years, the same as in football. That happened because volleyball became an olympic sport in 1964, and they had to change it so that it didn’t coincide with summer olympic games, which, in result, meant that the two competitions have been separated by two years. There have been 18 World Championship tournaments so far, this year’s edition is number 19, and we’ve had seven different national teams winning the tournament. Russia (as Soviet Union) is leading with six World Championship titles, they also lost in the final twice, and finished in third place once. The most interesting fact about all of the competitions so far is that in those 18 editions until 2014, European teams have won an astonishing 14 titles, and the other four went to American teams (three times to Brazil and the USA once). The reigning champions, Poland, have won the last edition of the tournament in 2014 on their home soil. This year’s event is co-hosted by Italy and Bulgaria and it is the first and only time so far that the volleyball World Championship has been hosted by two countries.
As I’ve mentioned before, Slovenian national team also managed to qualify for this year’s World Championship. It is the first time the team qualified for it, and in my opinion it is the biggest achievement after coming second at the 2015 European Championship. They have won a few other competitions in the meantime as well, but I still believe we couldn’t really compare that with qualifying for the World Championship. I have to say that I wasn’t able to watch all of Slovenian team’s games live, I did catch some parts of them here and there, but from what I have seen, I think they are playing really good. They are still among the undefeated teams, but the real tests for them, if I may say so, are still coming up. First, they will face Argentina tonight, and if they win this game, they will face Italy tomorrow and it will most likely decide who will be on top of their group at the end of this phase of the competition. So far they have beaten Dominican Republic and Japan with 3:1, and Belgium 3:2, after coming from 2 sets down, to stay closely behind Italy on top of the group table, even though they’ve played a game less than the hosts.
If you take a look at the results so far, there were a couple of surprising ones, at least for me. As one of the most surprising ones in my opinion, I would point out the Netherlands’ 3:1 win over Brazil. As it has been said already, I haven’t had much time to watch the games live, that is also one of the main reasons why this result surprises me. As the tournament goes on, I’m sure we will see some more unexpected or surprising results, maybe Slovenia can win a medal even, who knows. 😀
For those of you that aren’t that into volleyball but want to know what other teams are playing at the Championship, and how they are divided into four different groups (or pools as they say), take a look at the photo below. Currently, the games are being played in four different cities, in Florence and Bari in Italy, and Ruse and Varna in Bulgaria.
By what I have seen so far, which, I have to repeat myself again, wasn’t that much, I believe we have been able to see some good volleyball at the Championship, even at these early stages of the tournament. Of course, as the competition advances, the level of volleyball at the games will most likely intensify even more and we’ll be able to see a lot more amazing actions on the courts. Hopefully Slovenia indeed does get far in the tournament, as they are aiming for a high place finish. Not a lot of people expected from the team to win the silver medal at 2015 European Championship but they did, so let’s wait and see what happens this year.
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