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Chaumont never beat Narbonne

Both teams have five-set thriller behind them, and all their previous matches abounded in suspense

After beating Ajaccio, Chaumont were brought down to earth in St Nazaire after five sets. Coach Matijasevic and his players can have many regrets; they had a couple of chances to turn the game in their favour, including a major 7-2 lead in the fifth set, but the home team stubbornly kept coming back and ended up winning 16-14. In general, they played a good match, but it is unclear how they managed to lose the third set 13-25. But that didn't shake them a lot and they got the equalizer in fourth.

Egleskalns is definitely a major acquisition, he got an impressive 27 points on Saturday with 52% efficiency, but he didn't have enough support from his receivers Wounembaine and Terzic. That is especially true of the former, who got only six points, so Matijasevic replaced him with the young Demirovic in the third set. The middle blocker Trefle was the second most efficient player with 14 points, five of which were blocks. But he also didn't have supportive team-mates as Verhoeff and Cerha were left block-less.

Chaumont and Narbonne played each other for times so far, and Narbonne won all four matches. What is also interesting is that all four of them finished in 3-1 or 3-2.

- We were expecting to win in St Naizaire, but we missed too many opportunities to win. It is hard to explain what happened in the fifth set, we were ahead 7-2 and it seemed we had control of the situation, but our three mistakes in a row helped the home team to get back into the game and our team became insecure. However, we have to forget about that match as soon as possible, we are playing Narbonne the day after tomorrow, which is a very important match for us. We shouldn't be burdened by our head-to-head ratio; we never beat them, but that is not important as both of us have new teams - said Nikola Matijasevic, Chaumont coach.

Narbonne also played five sets on Saturday, but unlike Chaumont, they won the fifth-set thriller. They were down by three points all through the fifth set, but then their block started functioning and they turned the match over. The most important thing for coach Medei was that the captain Herpe and the middle blocker Sol, who turned out to be a major reinforcement, returned to the team. The former French national ended the match with 18 points, 12 of which came from blocks. The opposite Falasca reminded us of his best performances from last year and was the most efficient player of the match with 36 points. 

In spite of the win, Narbonne still have some weaknesses. That primarily refers to the number of mistakes. They made 37 mistakes on Saturday, 20 of them serving errors. They had only 5 points directly from serve and if it hadn't been for their 20 blocks, they would never come out as winners. Sol and Petreas make one of the better duos in the middle and the setter Prousalis will use them often in the offence. 

Here we have somewhat inexplicable odds that greatly favor Chaumont. I think this is not a real reflection of the quality between these two teams and this is why the total is set so low.
Narbonne have won all four head-to-heads so far, and have gone over 200 points on both occasions in Chaumont, while the games in Narbonne went over 185 points.
The teams in hand have similar qualities, although Narbonne have small advantage due to team cohesion, but Chaumont will have a full arena behind them. Over 181,5 seems like a logical thing to bet on here.