Italy vs Cuba Prediction: Cuba unlikely to surprise their opponents

What don't Giannelli and his comrades know about Robertlandy Simon and Marlon Yant? True, it should work the other way around too, but it's unlikely to work – Cubans don't like to know, they like to jump high and hit the ball hard.

The Italians won all three matches in the group with the same score of 3-0. They had problems only in one set against Canada, which had to be played to a score of 39-37. In all the games, they were better than their opponents on the block, and they did push-ups on the serve more often, the easier the game was. In the match with the Canadians, they lost their serve 17 times in three sets (well, in three and a half), while the Chinese only made eight similar serves.

After scoring four points in their first two group games, the Cubans predictably messed around in their match against Japan, but they did something in this game as well as in their previous two games - they often made mistakes on serve, again more than five times per set on average.

If we assume that the game against Italy will have more than three sets, the number of Cuban mistakes on serve is likely to exceed 20 again. In addition, Italy's youngsters are also unlikely to be able to afford to serve as gently as they did in the game against China. We can assume that the serving error total of 35.5 in four sets will be broken.

Cuba has another weakness, the setters.Their obviously low qualification will allow the Italian block, which worked properly during the whole group tournament. Betting on Italy's victory on blocks with minus handicap has high chances to pay off, because Cuba defeated only Qatar in the group and even lost to Japan with the score of 5-8 (Brazil - 11-15) in this element.

The last time these two teams faced each other was so long ago that it is difficult to draw any far-reaching conclusions from their previous results.

So, the odds on the Italian blocks are better than the others. Let's see how it goes. Well, in the meantime, we suggest the following options:

– Italy Blocks Handicap (-1.5) for 1.708;

– Total Under (181.5) for 1.65;

– Italy Points Handicap (-11.5) for 1.83.