The wait is almost over: Wednesday evening at 8:30 PM, the second leg of the Champions League quarterfinals will take place in Perugia against the Canarian team Guaguas Las Palmas.
The Block Devils are ready to return to the field, in their Sir Sicoma Monini Perugia guise, and to give it their all to secure a spot in the Final Four in Turin.
The focus is on the home arena, where the players were once again fully engaged today, starting in the morning with a check-up with Dr. Silvia Santucci, a nutritionist on the club’s medical staff, before moving to the weights room and onto the field for the usual group work with the ball.
In the afternoon, everyone returned to the taraflex for training, with a specific focus on the Canarian team, a fierce and particularly tough team, capable of mounting impressive comebacks, as has happened in both previous matches at their home ground this season. Both in the group stage, played at the Gran Canaria Arena on January 7th.
In Tuesday night’s first-leg quarterfinal, the “Guanches,” trailing by two sets, fought back, extending the contest to a tiebreak.
“We were in control of the match in Las Palmas during the first two sets, but after that, I don’t know. Perhaps we gave our opponents too much space and freedom to express their game.”
With this reflection, Kamil Semeniuk commented on Tuesday night’s match at the Gran Canaria Arena, a match that offers valuable insights ahead of the return match, which will be the fourth meeting this season with Juantorena and his teammates: “We’ve already played three matches against them, this will be the fourth, and we know very well that they have very experienced players who have played a lot of very important matches. So if we leave them room to show their level, as we did in Gran Canaria, they can play very well, as they showed at home. For us, that match became very difficult, but in the end we managed to win, and that’s more important; Obviously we wanted to win by three points, so in this return match in Perugia two sets would have been enough, instead now we have to win anyway, but better this way: we have to win and we will try to achieve this goal from the beginning to the end!
