Trento, 21 February 2025

SuperLega, on Saturday night new match at the ilT quotidiano Arena

This upcoming weekend marks the twenty-first round of the SuperLega Credem Banca 2024/25 regular season. The Itas Trentino men's team will be featured in one of the two advanced matches scheduled for Saturday, February 22, as they host Cucine Lube Civitanova at the ilT quotidiano Arena in Trento: second against third place in the league. The match is set to start at 8:30 PM, with live coverage on RAI Sport, Radio Dolomiti, and streaming on the OTT platform "VBTV."
ITAS TRENTINO NEWS For the third consecutive time in February, the yellow-blue team will be playing their SuperLega match on Saturday evening. This match is the last home game of their regular season. Important points are at stake to continue the race for first place, which will be contested until Sunday, March 2, in Perugia, which currently leads by set quotient with an equal point total (51).
"Saturday's game against Civitanova will undoubtedly be a match with high technical and emotional content," emphasized coach Fabio Soli in the presentation. "We intend to do our best in this final phase of the regular season and know perfectly well that Lube is a team capable of challenging us with their quality of play and deep roster, offering many possible alternatives. It will be necessary to be ready to adapt quickly to the many challenging situations, but even more important will be to deliver a good team performance."
Itas Trentino will present a complete lineup and will finish preparing for the match with training sessions this afternoon and a final practice on Saturday morning. This match will be the 1,081st in the history of the yellow-blue men's sector, the 37th of the season for the European Champions, and the 14th home game.
THE OPPONENTS Cucine Lube Civitanova arrives in Trento to play their third match in the past six days: after defeating Taranto 3-1 at home last Sunday, the red-and-whites played five sets in Padua on Thursday night, obtaining the point they needed to mathematically secure third place in the regular season standings. Already certain of their position in the upcoming Playoff grid, the recent Coppa Italia winners can now focus on their final two seasonal objectives, taking into account that besides the championship, they are still in the running for the Challenge Cup. For this competition, they will be in Turkey on Tuesday to face SK Ankara in the return leg of the semifinals, starting from their 3-0 victory in the first leg at Eurosuole Forum.
In the match played in Veneto, coach Giampaolo Medei cautiously rested the Turkish opposite Lagumdzija, who had sustained a moderate ankle sprain during the previous weekend's match against Gioiella Prisma; in his place, Croatian Dirlic (12 points) took the field. Marko Podrascanin will be regularly on the field, the most anticipated player of the match because for the first time he will return to Trento as a former player after being an extraordinary protagonist of the most recent yellow-blue successes (Supercoppa 2021, Scudetto 2023, and Champions League 2024), having scored 1,375 points in 187 official matches, and wearing the Captain's armband 51 times. Trentino Volley will honor him before the starting time.
THE BACKGROUND This will be the 103rd official meeting with Lube Volley Club, by far the club has been challenged the most times by Trentino Volleyball during its almost twenty-five-year history. The two clubs have played together in any kind of Italian event and on several occasions also in the international competitions (nine times in the Champions League and twice in the Club World Cup), also awarding a title on ten occasions; the two Clubs have in fact played against each other in the Scudetto Finals in 2012, 2017 and 2023, the Coppa Italia in 2012, 2013 and 2017, the Super Cup in 2009, 2013 and 2017 and the Club World Cup in 2018. The report is in favour of the Club from the Marche by 56-46, but Trento has won eight of the last thirteen matches and one of the three already on record this season. The first ever match was played at the Fontescodella in Macerata just over twenty-four years ago: on 8th December 2000, a 3-1 victory for the Lube Volley Club. The victory of Civitanova Club is the second most frequent result (18 times, including the one on 1st December in the Marche); the first is the tie break always in favour of Lube Club (22 times, including the Italian Cup semi-final in Bologna on 25th January). Trentino Volleyball has won twenty-five of the forty-one matches played at home against Cucine Lube and in particular the last five, in a streak that has lasted since 1st May 2023 (3-1 in the first game of the Scudetto Final).To find an away-game victory for the Cucine Lube Club in Trento, you have to go all the way back to 20th October 2022 (at the tie break), while for the first ever match played in the region you have to go back to 4th March 2001 (3-1 in the first game of the Scudetto Final).
THE REFEREES The match will be refereed by Marco Zavater (from Rome, in Serie A since 2008) and Dominga Lot (from Santa Lucia di Piave - Treviso, tenured referee since 2010 and international since 2017), at their fourth match of SuperLega refereed together in their career. Zavater is in his 15th match of the season in the league and will meet Trento again after the 3-1 home victory against Verona (on 10th November) and the 3-1 away-game victory in Cisterna di Latina (on 29th September); he has already refereed an Itas Trentino-Lube match once, in Civitanova Marche on 4th May 2023 with the locals winning at tie break. Lot is in his twelfth season direction in the regular season (two of these are for Trentino Volleyball: 3-0 against Milan on 26th December and 3-2 in Perugia on 12th January) and in his CV he has already refereed three times between the two clubs (two victories for Trento, one for Civitanova).
RADIO, INTERNET AND TV The meeting will be a global media event and therefore, will be broadcast live simultaneously on TV, radio and internet. On television, it will be broadcast by RAI Sport, channel 58 on the digital terrestrial platform, and also on theApp “Rai Play”.
The match will be reported live also by Radio Dolomiti, Trentino
Volleyball’s media partner. Frequencies to listen to the regional network are available on the website www.radiodolomiti.com, where it is also possible to follow the radio news live also in streaming.
Also confirmed is live video streaming on OTT platform, “VBTV”; there is a fee for the service. For more information about its use see the website
https://it.volleyballworld.com/volleyball-tv-it.
A summary of the match will be broadcast on Monday, February 24th at 9:45 p.m., on
RTTR channel, Trentino Volleyball’s media partner. Moreover, detailed updates will be
managed by the website of the Volleyball League Serie A (www.legavolley.it) and
www.trentinovolley.it, and always active on gialloblù social networks
(www.trentinovolley.it/facebook, www.trentinovolley.it/instagram and
www.trentinovolley.it/twitter).
SOLD OUT The tickets are sold out.
CAVIT DAY To celebrate their long-standing partnership with the Gialloblù audience, Trentino Volleyball and Cavit will organise some initiatives that will see the cooperative, which connects 11 Trentino wineries with 5,250 associated winegrowers, as the protagonist, together with its employees, of the entire event. Cavit produced the mvp prize, chosen by the jury of journalists at the end of the match: a three-litre Jeroboam of Muller Thurgau sparkling wine to toast with the teammates to the excellent performance they had just given.

Trentino Volley Srl
Press Office