The Cuban volleyball team suffered three significant losses due to injuries, less than a month before the Volleyball Nations League, announced the main authorities of that sport on the island.
The tournament will give the last tickets to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and will start on May 21. Cuba will play the first week in Rio de Janeiro and will clash against the host Brazil, Germany, Japan and Iran.
The three injured players play in the very important opposite position: Jesús Herrera (Perugia, from Italy), Miguel David Gutiérrez (Altekma SK) and Alejandro Miguel González (Ceske Budejovice, from the Czech Republic.
“They are sensitive losses, but the most important thing is to preserve the health of the players. “We will look for variants,” the national team coach, Jesús Cruz, said at a press conference.
He specified that Herrera, one of the team’s mainstays in several of the team’s last tournaments, requested time to recover from a knee injury that has hit him recently, and should not be in the first two weeks of the tournament. VNL.
Cruz, the president of the Cuban Volleyball Federation, Ariel Saínz, and doctor Lenin Hernández, also referred to the injuries of Alejandro Miguel González and Miguel David.
The former had knee surgery and will have around three months of recovery, so he may not be able to play in the League, and Miguel David Gutiérrez is recovering from a sprained ankle and will miss the first week of the League.
In the opposite position will be the experienced 37-year-old Michael “the Russian” Sánchez (Minas de Brazil), who returns to the team after not being called up to the 2023 Olympic Qualifiers, and other young figures.
The Cuban Federation registered a group of 24 players for the League, among them the stars Robertlandy Simón, captain Miguel Angel López, Marlon Yant and Javier Conceppción, the latter one of the first to return to the island and join the training sessions at the helm. de Cruz here in Havana.
Despite the last-minute setbacks, managers, coaches and players expressed in a press conference that the team’s goal is still to qualify for Paris-2024 and that there is a lot of optimism in the group.
The Nations League is the last scoring tournament for the Olympic ranking, which will give the last tickets to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Cuba will play two games against Argentina on May 17 and 18 and then will play in Rio de Janeiro the first week of the Nations League against the host Brazil, Germany, Japan and Iran.
