Andrea De Nicolao already has the knife between his teeth ahead of Treviso
Andrea De Nicolao, Acqua S.Bernardo Cantù’s experienced point guard, analyzes the loss to APU Udine and looks ahead to the next very important challenge with Nutribullet. “Tonight we lacked character and lost that tension that must not be lacking for the next game: now we roll up our sleeves, we have a week of work before the game with Treviso that we will play with the knife between our teeth as well as they do. We have to think positive because on Sunday we are not waiting for a game but ‘the game’ and with the help of our public we will make a different race,” he told LE News microphones at the end of the match at PalaCarnera.
On the same wavelength were the words of coach Walter De Raffaele, who analyzed his team’s performance in the press conference: “It deserved this victory because, except for a few moments in the second quarter, it always commanded the game and the inertia was always in its hands.” The white-blue coach then added, “We tried different quintets and situations, to cover absences and bad nights of some, but there was never that spark to rekindle on an emotional level a game that started on an uphill slope.” De Raffaele then concluded by already looking ahead to Sunday’s salvation challenge: “We have to have the ability to recover physically, erase and analyze what didn’t go, to try to be ready for the next game. We will play in front of our public, this I hope will give us some of the energy we lacked tonight.”
The defeat on the PalaCarnera floor therefore probably makes the home game against Nutribullet Treviso, a far from easy opponent, decisive. Matteo Cotelli, coach of Germani Brescia, who will face the Venetians in the same round of the championship, also knows it well, describing a team in great shape: “Treviso is a lineup that is going through a very good moment, as witnessed not only by the high-level basketball they are expressing, but also by the four successes accrued in the last five meetings.” An opponent, therefore, that De Nicolao and his teammates will have to respect to the utmost.
Cotelli warned in particular about the physicality of the Marca’s white-blacks: “Treviso is a formation that makes physicality and defensive intensity its main weapons, propitiating, from a statistical point of view, an important number of recovered balls. Characteristics that Cantù will absolutely have to neutralize in order to snatch those two points that could prove crucial for staying in Serie A even if the third team in danger of relegation, Dinamo Sassari, has a very complicated schedule ahead.
