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Sweden Sweeps Czechia, Reaches EuroVolley Quarters
It is Sweden's second EuroVolley quarter-final in its history and the fourth championship host it has knocked out since 2021. Italy is next, in Brno on Wednesday.
Czechia is out of its own European Championship. Sweden swept the hosts in Brno on Monday night and took a quarter-final place it has reached only once before.
Volleyball.it, whose bracket page was updated late that evening, gives the sets as 25-19, 25-23, 25-21, and Swedish public television independently confirms the first of the three.
Sweden went in as the lower-ranked side against a team that had won four pool matches in front of its own crowd. It is the fourth championship host the Swedes have knocked out in six years.
Romania and Bulgaria both went out to Sweden in 2021 and Germany followed in 2023, a sequence the federation keeps its own running count of, one host at a time.
This is only the second EuroVolley quarter-final Sweden has reached. The first was 2021, when it beat Bulgaria 3-2 in the last 16 and then lost to the Netherlands.
In between came a world championship qualification, two European League titles and a home tournament in Gothenburg that the federation lists among the milestones of the same climb.
Almir Ljutovac, the volleyball analyst for Sveriges Radio's Radiosporten, speaking afterwards. His words are translated here from the Swedish original.
"Now we have learned a lesson, that we should never doubt the Swedish women's volleyball team."
Italy is next in Brno on Wednesday, and the Swedish federation said the opponent is the world's top-ranked team and the reigning world and Olympic champion.
The two had already met in the pool at the Scandinavium in Gothenburg, one of this tournament's four host cities and Sweden's own, where Italy won 3-0.
Sweden has taken nothing off Italy here, and the quarter-final is where that record has usually ended. One set on Wednesday would be the first hard evidence that the gap has closed.
