Today, Thursday 13 at 18, Race 1 against Reyer Venezia, will be repeated tomorrow
Eventually we will play with the dead. On the Taliercio table today at 6 pm Reyer Venezia and Dinamo Sassari will play the first hand of the playoffs, but for the inaugural challenge of this quarter-final the biancoblù will not have their coach at the helm. Gianmarco Pozzecco, dismissed from the team for disciplinary reasons nine days ago, remained in Sassari and at this point – due to a whole series of logistical complications – it can be assumed that he will not appear in the Lagoon even tomorrow for race 2.
We will probably talk about it again on Sunday, when race 3 will be staged at PalaSerradimigni and the “fatwa” decided by the company will not be extinguished. With all due respect also to the fans who yesterday on the Change platform opened a petition to have Pozzecco on the bench for the playoffs, which in the evening had collected a hundred signatures.
Today, however, as in the last two regular season games, the assistant Edoardo Casalone will be at the helm of the Banco di Sardegna, together with Gerry Gerosa.
With the duo ball lifted by the first referee Saverio Lanzarini, the Scudetto playoffs will start exactly in the same point where the last edition ended: just under two years ago, on the Mestre parquet, Reyer and Dinamo played for the Scudetto in match7 of an exciting and endless final, which Walter De Raffaele’s team managed to win in the very last act. 23 months have passed and from a certain point of view, not only for the failure to finish last season, it seems like an eternity.
Just like in that last edition of the playoffs, Dinamo started with the fifth position on the grid, while the Venetians, then second, this time got the fourth place by blowing it in extremis to the biancoblù islanders. For cabal fans, the other constant compared to 2019 is Milan’s top spot at the end of the regular season.
Many of the protagonists of the Sardinian-Venetian saga are also the same: in addition to the two technical and managerial staff, there will be many veterans of that challenge on the field: from Stefano Tonut to Marco Spissu, from Stefano Gentile to Austin Daye, passing through the various Stone, Watt, De Nicolao, Mazzola, Cerella and Vidmar, with the latter struggling with some ailments and the feared killer Bramos out of time due to the injury remedied in Sassari in the regular season challenge.
By the way: also this year the two direct matches played in the regular season were very balanced, in accordance with the recent history of this match: at the end of October the hosts won 99-92 at the Taliercio; on the return to Piazzale Segni a Kruslin in the evening of grace dragged the Banco to what was the eighth consecutive victory. Then came in quick succession the Bendzius and Treier injuries, the Covid-19 outbreak and the two interminable weeks of quarantine. All factors that heavily influenced the Sassari in a fundamental moment of the season.
It cannot be said that Reyer went much better: in the first part of the season also the oroamaranths had to deal with a series of infections that put the tried and tested “apparatus” under the orders of coach De Raffaele in serious difficulty. In any case, he was able to count on a very deep roster and on top quality entries in the race, such as Clark, Campogrande and, just on the eve of this quarter-final, the ex Sassari Curtis Jerrells.
The particularly compressed calendar of the playoffs and the substantial irrelevance of the home factor, make a quarter-final to be savored even more balanced on paper. With the hope that Dinamo will not pay for the mental waste of the Sardara-Pozzecco quarrel and will be able to “enter” the series immediately, already tonight.
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