France stands as the worst possible enemy for Spain in the final of the Eurobasket 2022 of this Sunday. To the potential of the team led by Vincent Collet, Olympic runner-up in Tokyo 2020, we must also add the pending accounts between two teams that have fueled their rivalry to make it one of the great classics of the continent.
More than twenty battles emerge as precedents and Scariolo’s team has been the winner in most cases. The balance is overwhelming: 17 wins for only four losses. Some of them have been especially painful, such as the 2011 Eurobasket final in Lithuania, when Tony Parker’s France unsuccessfully tried to unseat Scariolo’s team, champion two years earlier. And the 2015 semifinal of the European Championship, when the French team fell to the Spanish team in Lille, in the presence of 25,000 fans in the stands, in one of the best games in the history of Pau Gasol, unstoppable with 40 points.
France came into the tournament as one of the firm candidates for the title and has asserted its status despite an irregular record in the tournament, which led it to concede two defeats in the first phase (against Germany and Slovenia) and beat Turkey in the round of 16 and Italy in the quarterfinals, in two games in which they needed extra time. In the semi-final, however, he gave Poland no chance. Rudy Gobert, incorporated this summer to the Minnesota Timberwolves, is emerging as the player capable of making a difference with his 215 centimeters, but New York Knicks forward Evan Fournier (average 14.4 points) and Madrid power forward Guershon Yabusele (average 15 points) appear as the other two key pieces of the French squad. But Collet also has notable secondaries such as point guard Thomas Heurtel (7.1 assists per game), Real Madrid center Vincent Poirier or shooting guard Luwawu-Cabarrot capable of breaking up a game.
