Brindisi goes to Verona, Alessandro Ramagli fears one aspect in particular
Thursday night will be held Game 1 of the Playoff Quarterfinals between Tezenis Verona and Valtur Brindisi, with the start set for 8:45 p.m. in the Pala AGSM AIM stage. A challenge that Alessandro Ramagli, coach of the Veneti, immediately framed with words of great enthusiasm but also of esteem towards the opponents. There was no lack of a full-throated appeal from him addressed to the fans.
“The most beautiful and exciting part of the season begins, the one in which the pressure rises and everyone has to give their best: the players, the staff, the society and the public. We meet an opponent of great depth and tradition, who until five days before the end of the regular season was playing for first place,” stressed Ramagli reflecting on Brindisi. “It is a roster that is difficult to measure up to. They changed the two Americans before the start of the playoffs, so it will be important to have a great sense of identity. Let’s focus on ourselves and embrace this challenge with great enthusiasm. We ask for the public’s help, the court factor must be an advantage for us.”
After all, Ramagli had already clearly outlined his vision for this confrontation the moment the pairing was made official. “I don’t think Brindisi is a team in crisis, Brindisi is a strong team, very strong, so it will be a very tough opponent and we will be for them a very tough opponent as it is right to be,” the coach from Livorno had said, adding with his usual bluntness, “It seems to me a nice and spicy quarterfinal this, we don’t find just any opponent we find a very strong team. It is clear that one of the two will cry at the end, let’s hope it will not be us.”
On the Brindisi front, the issue of changes in the roster mentioned by Ramagli is far from secondary. The Apulian club had already moved important pawns in the weeks leading up to the playoffs, formalizing the arrival of Khalil Ahmad, an American guard who had already starred in A2 with Pesaro, where he had traveled over 20 points on average. Ahmad, back from a stint in Israel with Rishon LeZion that ended with the consensual termination of his contract, took the place of Zach Copeland. A revolution in the foreigner pool that, as Ramagli himself pointed out, makes it difficult for opponents to find the right tactical countermeasures.
The regular season had, moreover, highlighted some cracks in the Brindisi mechanism in recent weeks. Coach Piero Bucchi had come to terms with a chiaroscuro end of the regular season, culminating in two consecutive defeats against Fortitudo Bologna – first at home, then in Pistoia – that had curbed the biancazzurri’s ambitions of supremacy. Precisely in the home knockout against Effe, Brindisi’s “two Americans” had been pointed out by Bucchi himself as one of the weak points: “Our two Americans struggled,” the Apulian coach had admitted at the end of the game, on a night when Alvise Sarto had dominated the scene with 24 points and 6/9 from the arc.
This evening’s game thus promises to be a challenge between two teams that, although starting from different paths in the last stretch of the season, harbor identical promotion ambitions. The AGSM AIM Pala is called upon to play its part: Ramagli knows it well, and his appeal to the Veronese public sounds like a real call to arms to turn the court factor into a decisive weapon right from the first two-ball.
