Also displaying good offensive production for Italy were outside hitter Myriam Sylla, with 11 points, and captain Anna Danesi, with eight.
"It's always good to beat Türkiye because they're a really good team, but above anything, I'm happy with our performance," Danesi commented. "We pushed hard from the start with our serves as our strategy was to get them out of system, but our blocking and defense also worked very well. This match helped us understand what we're going to find in the quarterfinals as only the best eight teams in the world continue alive. We're playing at a high level and are feeling good, so I hope that our opponents are a little bit scared of us."
For Türkiye, after Vargas, outside hitter Hande Baladin, with six points, and middle blocker Zehra Güneş and outside hitter Derya Cebecioğlu, with four each, were the ones with the biggest outputs.
"We made way too many mistakes in the first two sets," setter Cansu Özbay reflected. "We fixed that for the third set and played much better, but at the end we lost our focus again. Italy are a great team and I feel that we could never really play our game against them. Now we learn the lessons and focus on the quarterfinals. Looking forward, I just think we need to limit our errors and do a little bit better in every area of the game."
Italy's excellent performance had the VNL champions dominating their opponents in kills (44 to 32), blocks (nine to two) and aces (five to one), while also getting more points from errors (17 to 16).
