Display MoreThe final 6 pool distribution will be (one team to be drawn from each bracket) :
[Italy, Brazil] x [USA, Poland] x [Russia, Serbia]
For Italy, the following combination seems the optimal:
Italy, Poland, Serbia
That way, they can avoid Brazil, USA and Russia all at once.
It's not very difficult to be Nostradamus when it's a FIVB tournament.
Tournaments like this are ripe for conspiracy theories. Be it on collegiate level or international. Some people will always find something suspicious even out of the most mundane draw/selections especially if they feel like a host nation/team is getting a favorable draw. Having said that...they didn't really make it too difficult for people to question the legitimacy and fairness of this drawing. It's too amateur and quite frankly laughable. It's something you expect from a beer league and not from an international caliber tournament run by its very own international sports federation.
If we compare this tournament to the FIFA world cup, this one is clearly a beer league.
And we know that FIFA is full of corruption and FIFA world cup is full of refery mistakes in the "right direction".
You could easily manipulate a lottery with warm balls, cold balls. We've seen lottery manipulations lot of times in FIVB tournaments.
Japan started the tradition about a decade ago, come on... Yet nobody is calling Japanese cheaters and dishonest. The pools are closed, let's just enjoy the matches.
Its only because nobody realizes that there is an japanese male volleyball national team. There are just to small and have zero chanches to archieve anything.
Nobody said that Italy cheats EVERYTIME.
But 2010 and 2018 (+ lottery manipulation) FIVB create stupid and unfair formulas to favour the host.
