THE ghosts of Thursday's five-set collapse were back to haunt Nxled barely a day later.
After blowing a 20-12 fourth-set lead and eventually losing to EST Cola, the Chameleons found themselves staring at a hauntingly familiar scene against Ho Chi Minh, their 19-10 cushion suddenly down to just 22-21.
This time, the Chameleons held on.
READ: Nxled holds tough in fourth set to outlast gritty Ho Chi Minh
And at a crucial juncture of Nxled’s up-and-down 2026 PVL Invitational campaign, head coach Ettore Guidetti believes that near-repeat of Thursday’s nightmare offered exactly the kind of lesson preached by his fellow Italian, Julio Velasco.
Velasco is no ordinary coaching influence. The architect of Italy’s dominant men’s teams of the 1990s, he led the Azzurri to back-to-back world championships in 1990 and 1994 before guiding them to Olympic silver in Atlanta in 1996.
Nearly three decades later, he returned to lead Italy’s women to a historic Olympic gold in Paris in 2024 and the world title in 2025.
Now, with Nxled having gone through the eye of a needle after four games just to remain in the hunt for a finals berth, Guidetti said he will take to heart one of Velasco’s teachings about surviving difficult moments.
“The most important coach that has been one of my teachers, Julio Velasco, used to say one simple thing, and it's this: to learn how to manage difficult situations, you have to learn to win under difficult situations," Guidetti said.
“The win always helps more than a loss, but from a loss, you have to learn something manually.”
Nxled got a crash course in that philosophy over the last two days.
The Chameleons let Thursday’s match against EST Cola slip away after surrendering their 20-12 lead in the fourth, only to nearly experience the same collapse against Ho Chi Minh. But unlike the day before, Nxled regrouped when its 19-10 advantage was trimmed to 22-21 and found a way to finish.
The response came barely hours after another draining five-set battle, yet Guidetti said his players came back determined to prove that one loss would not break them.
“It looks like we love to fight, because the last game was a five-set and it was only a few hours ago. It was really tough and we wanted immediately to show that we never back down, we are not broken, we will never be broken after losing a match, and we are ready to fight," he said.
“My team is made of fighters, so this is simply the gasoline that my Ferrari supercar needs to play another difficult match.”
For Guidetti, Nxled's Ferrari may still be navigating a bumpy road. But after nearly watching the same nightmare unfold twice in two days, the Chameleons at least learned one important thing from the second scare: difficult situations can only become manageable by learning to win through them.
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