Losing a game is never good news, but a defeat today against Sepsi would be much more detrimental to Spar Girona than, for example, last Saturday’s defeat against Valencia in Fontajau. This afternoon (18.00, on the Sport 3 website or on the FIBA YouTube Channel), Uni is playing to enter the group stage of the Euroleague and the chance to face the best basketball teams current in a preliminary round that, for health reasons, is played in a single match in a bubble in Izmit. In Turkey, Girona will find a Sepsi that is the best team in Romania, with good players like the Americans Tobin and Gardner, the Montenegrin Jovana Pasic, or the 39-year-old Romanian veteran Simina Mandache. But that is neither Valencia nor a better team than Spar Girona despite the risk of playing the European season in a single game in a pavilion without an audience after three days locked in a hotel many kilometers from home. “It’s a game that we have marked in the calendar for many days, we know that we are playing because it is the classification for the Euroleague, we know where we are and that we have to change the chip of the League and that we enter the dimension FIBA, where the profile of the match changes because the refereeing allows a lot more contacts “, explained Surís yesterday, who is still in the match without any significant new physical setbacks in his squad.
The winner of the qualifier between Spar Girona and Sepsi, as well as the duel between Izmit and the Hungarian Miskolc that is played three hours earlier, will qualify for a Euroleague that will play the group stage in the format of bubbles. In the case of Girona, they would share a group with the team that has dominated European basketball in recent years, Ekreaninburg by Breanna Stewart and Alba Torrens, among others, the Italian Scchio and the Latvian Riga. The first bubble is scheduled for November 29 to January 5 and, for now, FIBA has announced that it will be held in Girona or Sfantu Gheorghe (Romania) depending on whether Uni or Sepsi wins this afternoon. Logically, the celebration of the bubble in Fontajau is conditioned to the evolution of the pandemic because the declaration of the state of alarm and the establishment of the curfew is subsequent to the designation of Girona and Sfantu Georghe as the two possible headquarters .
In any case, to get to the bubble, Spar Girona must beat Sepsi today, which, despite losing its top scorer last year (former Uni Crissy Givens), has made a squad designed to try to play the Euroleague. “Sepsi is a Eurocup classic with a block and a coach that they have maintained for years and with some reinforcements that they have made this season thinking about trying to qualify for the Euroleague,” said Suris yesterday about a team that eight years ago he has the same coach, Zoran Mike, and he has Mandache, a three-four shooter with many years of career, the American Gardner on the outside and Tobin on the inside, a Greek base (Pavlopoulu) and a Slovak pivot d ‘1.92 tall, Marie Ruzickova.
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