Men's VNL off with a bang

Some high scoring by Serbia's Drazen Luburic and the Netherlands' Nimir Abdel-Aziz highlighted the opening day of the 2021 FIVB Men's Volleyball Nations League at Italy's Adriatic resort of Rimini, Friday.

Both of the day's top scorers, though, stopped at 29 points - just one short of making the list of players to have scored 30 points or more in a single match.

• Check out the individual rankings of players

Nimir's performance just wasn't quite enough for the Netherlands to score a major upset in their first evenr VNL appearance, as defending champions Russia produced solid enough volleyball for a successful four-set win to open their 2021 campaign.

Maxim Mikhaylov, the MVP of the inaugural VNL in 2018 led Russia with 25 points.

Japan also opened with some impressive stuff, shutting out Iran in just over an hour and a half.

Other strong performances on Day 1 included Germany's 3-0 win over Australia and France's 3-0 sweep of Bulgaria - both in under 90 minutes.

But it was a far more balanced (and highly entertaining) affair when VNL rookies Slovenia stood up to mighty Serbia and made them work for a very hard-earned victory in four - including the day's highest-scoring set at 36-34.

Then came Argentina, who are in Rimini with just nine players (the remainder of their squad never getting to travel after testing positive for Covid-19 before departure), but still gave reigning Olympic champions Brazil a run for their money in the South American classic.

However, with coach Marcelo Mendez having limited choices to shake things around it wasn't to be and Brazil just barely wrapped it all up in three.

• Check out the full results and details of all matches, plus remaining schedule
• Check out the full standings