The best four teams of the 2022-2023 season in Italian men’s club volleyball – Itas Trentino Trento, Gas Sales Bluenergy Piacenza, Cucine Lube Civitanova and Sir Susa Vim Perugia – are set to battle for the first major domestic trophy of the 2023-2024 season this week. Starting on Tuesday, October 31, the two Del Monte Supercoppa Italiana semifinals will be played, and on the following day the super cup trophy will be handed to the winners of the big final.
Superlega 2023
Italian men’s super cup: the battle begins on Tuesday!
Four stellar teams to battle for season’s first major national trophy in Italy
Published 07:17, 26 Oct 2023
- Watch Del Monte Supercoppa Italiana live and on demand on VBTV.
The newly renovated 5,000-seater Biella Forum in the north-western Italian city of Biella will stage the three matches of the two-day showdown with the stellar squads of the 2023 SuperLega champions and runners-up, SuperLega regular season winners and Coppa Italia winners vying for the 28th Supercoppa trophy.
Tuesday’s first semifinal, starting at 17:30 local time (16:30 UTC) will feature reigning Italian champions Trentino against reigning club world champions, defending Suppercoppa laureates and last SuperLega regular season winners Sir. Curiously, these two clubs also met in the semifinals of five of the previous six super cup editions, with the team from Perugia winning in 2017, 2019 and 2022 and the team from Trento advancing to the final in 2018 and 2021. Overall, the two clubs have met 51 times, with Sir having won all of the five most recent encounters and leading the head-to-head series by 28 to 23.
The Block Devils from Perugia have won the super cup trophy four times so far, all within the six most recent editions of the competition. In the quest for their fifth Supercoppa crown, their new head coach Angelo Lorenzetti (three-time super cup winner in his coaching career so far) will rely on plenty of top-level international players like Italian playmaker Simone Giannelli, Slovenian setter Gregor Ropret, Cuban opposite Jesus Herrera, outside hitters Wilfredo Leon and Kamil Semeniuk of Poland, and last year’s Most Valuable Player Oleh Plotnytskyi of Ukraine, middle blockers Sebastian Sole of Argentina and Flavio Gualberto of Brazil, and Italian libero Massimo Colaci, a six-time super cup winner, among others.
Trentino, on the other hand, have triumphed as Italian super cup winners three times, in 2011, 2013 and 2021. The five-time club world champions will also feature plenty of bright stars on new head coach Fabio Soli’s squad, like Italian setter Riccardo Sbertoli, Luxembourgish opposite Kamil Rychlicki, Italian outsides Alessandro Michieletto and Daniele Lavia, and middles Marko Podrascanin of Serbia (who also raised the super cup trophy as many as six times) and Jan Kozamernik of Slovenia, to name a few.
2023 SuperLega silver medallists Lube will take on 2023 Coppa Italia winners Gas Sales in the second semifinal, starting at 20:30 local time (19:30 UTC). The club from Civitanova celebrated victorious in seven of the eight encounters with the opponents from Piacenza, all of which were in SuperLega matches over the previous four seasons. The only time the Wolves beat Lube was in an away five-setter in October 2021.
After claiming the national cup crown last season, Gas Sales are now aiming at the second big trophy in the young club’s history. Head coached by legendary Andrea Anastasi, who won the Supercoppa at the helm of Sir last year, top-calibre athletes like Olympic champion setter Antoine Brizard of France, world champion opposite Yuri Romano of Italy, Brazilian star outsides Ricardo Lucarelli and Yoandy Leal, and Cuban middle blocker titan Robertlandy Simon will show their magic on the court at the Biella Forum on Tuesday.
There will be no shortage of world-class players on the other side of the net, as Lube will go after their fifth super cup trophy with the likes of Argentinean playmaker Luciano De Cecco, prominent opposites Ivan Zaytsev of Italy and Adis Lagumdzija of Türkiye, rising star outsides Marlon Yant of Cuba and Aleksandar Nikolov of Bulgaria, top-notch middles Simone Anzani of Italy and Olympic champion Barthelemy Chinenyeze of France, and world champion libero Fabio Balaso of Italy on head coach Gianlorenzo Blengini’s roster. Lube won the Supercoppa Italiana in 2006, 2008, 2012 and 2014.
“There will be Olympic, world and European champions among super cup participants. We want to try to fill up the Biella Forum, because we organize these events precisely to sow seeds, with the idea of letting young people experience volleyball that the great players of the Italian teams can bring,” said Lega Pallavolo Serie A President Massimo Righi during the presentation of the upcoming tournament.
Wednesday’s big final starts at 17:00 local time (16:00 UTC).
