Neighboring countries of Azerbaijan and Georgia are officially signed to co-host the 2017 European women’s volleyball championships after a ceremonial signing on Tuesday in the Georgian capital of Tbilsi. Now, the whole party will shift 278 miles (450km) east to the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.
Courtesy: CEV
The event, which comes with theatrics, ceremony, and tons of attention in volleyball-crazed Europe, will determine the draws of 4 pools of 4 teams each that will play in next summer’s championship tournament from September 20th-October 1st.
Baku will host 2 of the 4 preliminary groups and the knockout stages of the tournament at the National Gymnastics Arena that was built for the inaugural European Games hosted in 2015.
The other two pools will be held in Tbilsi and Ganja-Goygol, a city in northwestern Azaerbaijan.
The event will begin at 6pm local time (2pm GMT) and will start with the announcement of the other two pool leaders. The host nations are automatically named pool leaders, and the remaining spots are a choice that belongs as a privilege to the host countries.
That wrinkle could make for lopsided pools. As compared to the men’s bracket where the host country Poland ranks 2nd in the world, the hosts of the women’s tournament are not as highly rated – Azerbaijan is 24th and Georgia is 115th – and would not have even been chosen for the tournament were it not for the decision for a Baku co-host. The teams drawn into the Georgia group will be almost guaranteed of advancement to the knockout stages in some form, with the only wrangling for top position and a bye to the quarterfinals.
Logically, the two-time defending champions from Russia are a strong candidate as another pool leader; so too are the Olympic silver medalists from Serbia. On the other hand, if the hosts wanted to create the fairest draws, they would instead choose the two lowest-ranked teams as the other hosts, which would force at least one of the world’s top 8 teams (#3 Serbia, #5 Russia, #7 Netherlands, and #8 Italy) into each group. While benevolent, however, that decision would not give Azerbaijan its best chance at advancement, so self-preservation might win out.
Russia and Netherlands, as the finalists of last year’s tournament, cannot be drawn into the same group.
The rest of the field, and how they qualified:
- Russia, Netherlands, Serbia, Turkey, Germany – top 5 finishers at the 2015 European Championships
- Italy, Belgium, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Belarus – qualified via second round qualification tournaments in September. The runners-up of the 6 groups advanced to head-to-head knockout matches in October, where
- Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary – qualified via the third-round qualifier in October.
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