Atypical Friday for the Varese Basketball which is preparing for the postponement of Monday 26 January at 8pmwhen the red and whites visit theOlimpia Milan. The Milanese are coming off a terrible week of Euroleague, in which they suffered two heavy defeats against Real Madrid per 106-77 and against it Zalgiris Kaunas 82-86thus putting the qualification for the playoffs at serious risk.
Coach Peppe Poeta’s boys, already very strong in themselves, will be an even more dangerous opponent for the team Openjobmetis who will find a team wounded and eager for redemption. In recent years the away games in Milan have coincided with painful defeats for Varese which however, this year, can at least cling to a historical fact to try to look positively at a challenge which on paper has no history: the last derby between the two teams played at the PalaLido in the championship dates back to 21 December 2003 when the group led by Giulio Cadeo prevailed to 86-93which is a viaticum for an undertaking far from predictable?
Market chapter: in the last few hours there has been an indiscretion according to which Virtus Bologna would have targeted Carlos Stewart but at the moment Pallacanestro Varese has not been contacted by the Italian champion club.
As always, he thought about presenting the match coach Kastritis in the press conference starting from how the team reacted to the defeat against Venezia: “We trained well. Every week, regardless of whether we come from a victory or a defeat, I think it is important to see how the team reacts to the result just obtained. More or less the reaction I saw is always the same, we tried to train as best we could to prepare properly for a complicated match like the one in Milan”.
ABOUT MILAN: “They are one of the best teams in our championship, physical and very long in rotations. We know how strong they are but we have to go to Milan to impose our game, following the match plan we tried in training.”
THE REBOUNDING PROBLEM HAS BEEN CURRENT IN THE LAST TWO MATCHES: “We analyzed this situation during the week. The rebounds come from loose balls and to get them you need malice, hunger and the desire to get there before the opponent. It takes great mental attitude even before the physical one. We must learn to give everything in defense until the end, even if we are tired, even if we have just made an intense marking, because only by remaining concentrated until the end can we then go and get the rebound. Sometimes we lack this thing and we have to improve on this.”
HOW TO START AGAIN AFTER THE LAST TWO DEFEATS: “We have to be more consistent, better at understanding the moments of the match and managing them. It’s all part of a growth process in which details make the difference.”
ON HOW CHOICES ARE IMPROVED AT KEY MOMENTS OF THE MATCH: “You have to be good at growing mentally in managing the fatigue that leads you to then make bad decisions especially in the second part of the match. We talked about what happened with Treviso and Venezia, looking at all those possessions that we managed badly especially in relation to the two partial scores that we took and which cost us the two defeats and I think that the boys have understood where they went wrong and how to work to avoid the repetition of these situations.”
Alessandro Burin
