Yukior ended the season in fifth place of the MVL Cup

After the silver of the championship of Russia, we waited, least, Yukior's exit to the semifinals of the MVL Cup in New Urengoy. Everything went to that: Our youth, despite the loss in the SSHOR SMO -Samotlor group 2:3, took first place in her quartet due to full victories over Dynamo-LO-2 and Kazan Zenit-UOR.

And then a number of circumstances intervened, who threw us out of the further fight for the podium. At first, contrary to all volleyball logic, the capital's Dynamo-Olympus lost in the last match of the group stage to the wild-card holders from Nova-2 and fell back to last place. And we, respectively, Instead of the Volzhans in the quarterfinals, they received as opponents much more difficult and motivated by their failure Muscovites.

But it's not so scary either: In the Russian Championship this season we won all four matches against Dynamo-Olympus, losing only two games. This time I found a scythe on a stone from the leader of the Ugra attacks, Georgy Serov., fired at all the outs and tapped the block. If he played at least half his capacity, I'm sure, victory would be ours. However, the team still managed to pull out the hardest fourth set (29:27), and in the tie-break it was not enough, 12:15.

This is the tournament formula, that the quarterfinals do not provide second chances and are a kind of watershed: the loser goes to the consolation playoff for fifth place. There we again beat Dynamo-LO-2 without any problems and took revenge on SSOR Samotlor 3:1. Fifth place - probably, not a failure, but not success either, of course. In fact, everything was decided by one shortened set in the match with Dynamo-Olympus.

And the winner of the MVL Cup was the absolute favorite of the season “Lokomotiv-SSHOR” from Novosibirsk, beat the hosts from Fakel-Yamal in the final. Kazan took third place, which we, recall, defeated in the group stage, fourth - our offenders Muscovites.

The season for YUKIOR as a whole ended on a positive note - still, the long-awaited championship medals are much heavier than the missed opportunities in the Cup. Ugra volleyball at youth level, anyway, is among the leaders in the country. And if a couple of years ago we rejoiced at the very fact of getting into the Final Six of the MVL Championship or the Final Eight of the MVL Cup, then now we're upset, if we don't win medals. Also, a number of YUKIOR players managed to appear in the Super League in matches for Gazprom-Yugra - and this, perhaps, an even more important result.

Thanks for the season and see you in the fall!