Euro 2023 volleyball: “This French team has something more,” laments Giani

Andrea Giani, France coach after the quarter-final victory against Romania 3-0:

“It was our most important match of this first part of the tournament and we managed it well. We did the first two sets and the end of the 3rd as a team, everything was good in terms of attitude, intentions and technical quality (...) This team has something more than the other teams have not, but she needs to have the right intentions to achieve it. We saw it at the start of the 3rd set, when she loses sight of that, she is a team like any other.

(About the Final Four in Rome) It will of course be something emotional for me, not so much because it's in Italy. It's because we're playing semi-finals, it's the level of competition that interests me. This gives the value of the team, it is important for us to reach the semi-finals, we learn a lot. If we had to play against Italy (who play their quarter-final against the Netherlands on Tuesday), I can't deny that I would be emotional, the Italy coach is a friend (his former teammate in the team Italy Ferdinando De Giorgi with whom he formed the golden generation of Italian volleyball, Editor's note), many players, I trained them in clubs. “Italy is the team to beat and it’s against this kind of team that we want to measure ourselves.”