Nice starts its championship poorly and gives Nancy a well-deserved victory. At the same time, the team from the Côte d’Azur ends their home invincibility streak that had lasted since last season.
Unfortunate finalists last spring, Mladen Kasic’s players had refreshed their roster by strengthening it with intelligent recruiting.
All the conditions were therefore in place for a promising start in front of the Palmeira crowd who came in large numbers (850 spectators including about twenty overzealous fans who sometimes find, in the stands, the legitimacy to express their foolishness in the name of supposed support for the local team) but nothing went as planned and it was the visitors who ultimately walked away with the three points for the victory.
The team from Nice had actually started the match well, winning the first set with flair (25-17).
The path to success seemed clear, but that didn’t account for David Feughouo’s reactive spirit, who literally dominated the match with 31 points.
The team from Nice disappeared during the second (20-25) and third sets (18-25) thanks also to a strong reception, an energetic game distribution (an excellent Ribbens outperformed his counterpart Berrios in efficiency) from the Lorrains.
It was only after a 1-7 break in the fourth set that the home team got back into the match and the score (18-20), without, however, escaping defeat on the first match point: 23-25.
Mladen Kasic did not hide his disappointment: “We won’t say we were very good before the match and that we are bad now. The disappointment comes from the fact that we had trained well for a month and we failed in our performance. We played very well in the first set and then we lost clarity. Why? This big slap must prompt a reaction from us”.
