Italians just can't be bored. Now you can’t tell what the guests were guided by, choosing a hotel in Sokolniki for their stay in the Russian capital. Perhaps they originally planned to get acquainted with the sights of the subway, where, as you know, there are no identical stations, and knew in advance that there would not be any specifically for this time.
To disguise an excursion as a trip to a match - what is not a useful thing?
Entering the role of tourists or regular passengers, the Napoli basketball players forgot why they came to Moscow. Or they wanted to get on the escalator to where the owners drive on jet planes. In any case, the first minutes of the match clearly worked the rule "stand on the right, pass on the left." The role of the hurrying, of course, was made by the army team.
Ettore Messina immediately offered rivals pressure throughout the site. It seems that this season CSKA didn’t strangle anyone in the Euroleague. “After all, we are working out this element in training - we must have it in our arsenal,” - on the lips of the coach of the hosts it sounded as if the Muscovites were going to simply roll away something that had not been done before in a meeting with Napoli.
However, according to what the metropolitan audience saw, it was difficult to expect another. In the very first attack, an American with a Georgian passport Tyrone Ellis crawled under the "pot" of Alexei Savrasenko, and subsequently clearly could not cope with the aggressive owners. After a timeout, Pierre Luigi Bucci threw Valerio Spinelli into the fray, but he instantly got confused in his own legs and presented the ball to John Holden.
By the end of the 7th minute, the scoreboard was 17: 0, and on the eighth, the audience sincerely applauded the angry Jeff Trepan, by the way, the ex-teammate of Trajan Langdon in “Cleveland”. By that time, it really seemed that CSKA was determined to win dry. At least a quarter. Soaked, but it didn’t become more fun because the hosts' advantage confidently exceeded the 20-point mark.
“Our team was like a hungry tiger overtaking a sheep,” Ettore Messina showered with metaphors. “For 15-16 minutes, this sheep was devoured, stuffed with a stomach and ... pff-ff ..."
The Italians managed to cling to such a gloomy difference, but not so shameful for meeting with the Euroleague champion. And even reduce it to quite cultural at the finish line, when CSKA frankly “stood”. The match came to an end with such speed that the girls from the support group did not even have time to really warm up. There were almost no pauses for timeouts, and Messina experimented without tension, refused pressure, paid more attention to protection under the ring, where Neapolitans, tired of misses from the perimeter, began to get into too often. And, finally, he used more young Russian players.
Most went to Anton Ponkrashov. First time on the site, then on nuts. St. Petersburg, who received the prize of the best young player of the first month of November in the Russian Super League, so far, rather, can claim the title of main disappointment. "Maybe they put too much pressure on him?" - Perplexed Messina, who noticed that young people in training CSKA pay very much attention. "Maybe we didn’t need to invest in the future, it would be better to invest in Panova?" - the joke of the Italian specialist carried a fair share of bitterness.
Now Ponkrashov does not resemble the main hope of Russian basketball. In the attack, he makes stupid losses, misses from under the ring, gets jogs and fouls in the attack, overshoots the ball, is afraid to give a pass under the shield, and in defense he looks slower than the much more experienced Holden, Langdon, David Vanterpool and even Zakhar Pashutin.
That is why Messina, spreading her arms, make assumptions about pressure, lack of character and apply unpleasant epithets like childish and even idiots (Andrei Vorontsevich, who barely noticed himself on the floor, but managed to get into trouble, got into a hot hand). And this is after a large-won match. So say after this that the Moscow Italian is not worried about Russian basketball.
Nikolai TSYNKEVICH