Serbia: Introducing a WCH Newcomer
Serbia has no fistball league of its own. The sport is concentrated solely on Belgrade, the capital city. Traditional clubs such as those found in Austria simply do not exist. The squad for the World Championships consists of 16 men aged 24 to 50, all either current or former volleyball players. Many of them have played in the highest Yugoslavian, and later Serbian, league and some even had contracts as professionals outside their homeland.
The Serbian national team currently trains twice a week on the training pitch of a Belgrade football club. "It's a stroke of luck for us", says coach Torsten Hilscher, obviously grateful for this opportunity, "because otherwise we'd have to use a public park in Belgrade to prepare for the WCH and the climate means there are very few suitable ones." The lack of subsidies from a national association means that a purpose-built training facility is currently out of the question. Despite this, the players are putting all their energy into their training which is modelled particularly on Austrian methods. "We took part in a training camp in Linz (May 2008) which gave all my players a very good grounding in the essentials under the supervision of the most famous Austrian coaches, and we still reap the benefits from that in every training session today."
The Serbian team has been eagerly awaiting the 2011 Fistball WCM for four years now, since it represents the high point of their career to date. The Serbs are delighted with the teams they have been drawn to play in the preliminary group phase (Brazil and Namibia): "It will be a great honour for all of us to play the double World Champions Brazil," says Hilscher. Whereas the motto in the match against such a powerful opponent can only be "to give as good an account of ourselves as possible" the coach believes his players have at least an outside chance against Namibia. "To win we'll definitely have to give 110%. But we want to finish far ahead of nations such as the Czech Republic, Japan and the USA."
The Serbs have great expectations of the World Championship: "We can't think of any better organisers than Austria. There's no doubt that it will be an outstanding event and one we will never forget!"
Team:
Spiker:
Milan Kavaric
Vojislav Skoric
Ivan Milenkovic
Dusan Zezelj
Dusan Ilic
Setter:
Nenad Kovacevic
Defender:
Mirko Neskovic
Zoran Cvetkovic
Nikola Biberovic
Milos Milurovic
Aleksandar Milojevic