Ball – Three hours of travel for European training and play in Tel Aviv (volleyball)

Dinner time passed in Israel and Joao José with the coaching staff was preparing for the matches that Portugal will play, starting today, in Tel Aviv, home to Group D of the European Championship that Bulgaria is also co-organising – in fact, Portugal’s group intersects with Group B that competes in Varna – Italy (European and world champions) and North Macedonia until September 16, when the final will be held in Rome.

However, with the “focus on Romania”, the national team’s first opponent, the coach was attentive.

“It’s a rising team, it’s reached the Golden League. Then we have France [campeã em 2015]And Turkey, which ascended to the League of Nations, in addition to Romania, Greece and Israel, of course. The first four passes”, explained the coach to A BOLA about the seventh time that Portugal has been in the final stage of the European Championship, for the third time in a row.

Despite the rivals’ manuscripts, the team, whose best record in the competition was fourth place in 1948 (Italy) and then, by invitation, seventh place in 1951 (France), but with fewer teams, has the goal of achieving Next goal: to reach the round of 16. “We have experienced players and other young players, we are in a transitional period, but it is clear that we aim to perform better than in the last matches. It is part of the goals. In this edition, I feel we have an obligation to pass this stage.

“However, the goal is always tomorrow’s game and each of the others in the following days, always with a lot of work”, confirms the coach of the national team whose results in the final stages of the Europeans reached tenth place in 2005 and, after a long break, fourteenth in 2011. , twentieth in 2019 and fifteenth in 2021, these last two entries have already participated in 24 countries, and in the last entry, in black only, they lost to the Netherlands and missed the unprecedented access to the quarter-finals. Between watching videos, matches and training with almost no breaks, Joao José knows that the difficulty of the European Championship also includes the exhaustion of trips to the Shlomo Group Stadium, where the Group D competition is being played.

“We are in a hotel 45 minutes from the suite. We have an hour and a half to travel. For example, tomorrow [hoje] We will train from 12:00 to 13:00, then go back to the hotel and since we only play at the end of the day, we have another hour and a half of travel time and game time. So we will get very tired. The 45-year-old former defender pointed out that this is going to be complicated day in and day out, stressing that the secret of success can be summed up in the word work.

And this is what happened even in Guadalajara, the stage of special preparations with its Spanish counterpart, in which Portugal won twice and lost one, to serve as a slogan of “good feelings towards the group” that, remember, qualified directly to the final stage. From the European Championship with five wins and one defeat in the fourth qualifying group.