Turkey head coach Slobodan Kovac had multiple cause to rejoice on Saturday, as his crew received off on the appropriate foot on the 2025 FIVB Males’s Volleyball World Championship.
Kovac, a Serbian nationwide who has solely been with the Turkish nationwide crew for a couple of months, was celebrating his birthday simply as his squad confronted off towards higher-ranked Japan on the Good Araneta Coliseum.
And his gamers delivered the right present, pulling off a surprising 25-19, 25-23, 25-19 victory to shock the world No. 5 Japanese aspect.
However Kovac was fast to deflect the credit score, emphasizing that it was his gamers who received the job finished as they opened their Pool G marketing campaign with a 1-0 document.
“We performed actually good, tactically. We performed good volleyball. We performed with good self-discipline,” mentioned Kovac.
Ramazan Mandiraci and Adis Lagumdzija fashioned a lethal one-two punch for world No. 16 Turkey. Mandiraci dropped 5 aces and completed with 17 factors, whereas Lagumdzija contributed 15 markers.
Turkey performed so nicely that they compelled Japan into committing 23 errors and held two of its stars, Yuki Ishikawa and Ran Takahashi, to simply 10 and 4 factors, respectively.
For Kovac, the win was a testomony to his crew’s potential to maintain up with one of the best groups on the earth.
“Earlier than this Championship, it’s completely regular, we’re no one. Everyone says there are some groups who will play right here and after the second spherical, go dwelling,” Kovac defined.
“And I attempt to clarify to the gamers that we don’t coach to be a no one. My gamers have performed towards one of the best European groups and have the standard to play high-level volleyball.”
—JKC, GMA Built-in Information
