“It hurts,” says women’s Italian national volleyball team coach Davide Mazzanti at the end of the match lost to Brazil in the semifinals of the world championships. “We realized from the start that it was going to be a tiring match for us; even in the difficulties however we had a chance to turn the match around, but there is no doubt that that final third set at the psychological level cut us off a bit. In the fourth set in fact we did not come back on the court with the right lucidity, with the set we also lost the awareness that we could stay ahead of them. Tonight’s was a match in which we should have chosen our shots well and instead we always waited too long. It will be difficult on Saturday because it is not the final we would have liked to play; now we have some time to look at each other and go on the court to do ours.”
This assessment allows us to understand what should be meant by psychological pressure when playing absolute level games. Even just a mistake like Egonu’s in the final of the third set that would have allowed Italy to go 2-1 can have a deadly negative effect cut the legs off as Mazzanti said. These facts tell us how high the level of psychological stress teams experience and how the mental balance can be broken by individual episodes.
This is the beauty of absolute level sports not only the quality of the game but how much this is determined by the psychological condition which in turn can change as a result of individual episodes. Everything can change in an instant and it is extremely difficult to know how to react and not suffer these moments. The solution goes beyond training, mental preparation and having already played matches at this level. We need players who can convey confidence and encouragement continuously and with intensity, because if it is true that individual episodes change the mood of the team, then it can also be in a positive sense and, therefore, someone has to take this responsibility.
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