Fortitudo Bologna loses Gianluca Della Rosa for opener vs. Verona
The doubt was there, now it is gone. And certainly not in the way Fortitudo Bologna team and fans were hoping for. In the game that will open the playoff semifinal against Verona on Wednesday night, in fact, Attilio Caja will have to give up Gianluca Della Rosa. The Pistoiese point guard had already been in strong doubt for days, that is, since the game with Avellino last Sunday, but in the meantime the certainty of his absence has arrived.
Della Rosa had stopped after a contact with Francis, suffering a blow to a testicle with related edema. In the meantime, as confirmed by the ‘Resto del Carlino,’ the situation developed in a negative way for the player. In the night between Monday and Tuesday, in fact, his clinical condition worsened so much that he had to be hospitalized. The Bologna newspaper’s website added that the investigations carried out ruled out even more serious implications, although conservative therapies had to be used. In other words: the 1996 basketball player is doing better and will come out of it without consequences, but on Wednesday night Fortitudo Bologna will have to take the court without him.
Della Rosa’s absence weighs on a delicate moment, but Effe is coming to the semifinals after overcoming a far from easy series against Avellino. The quarterfinals had opened in the best possible way for Bologna, with a 76-58 win at PalaDozza in game 1, in which Sorokas had been the dragging force with 17 points. Even then, however, Caja had urged his team not to get excited: “We have to have few parties and reset. That’s not the real gap, Avellino is a great team and we have to be ready on Saturday and definitely brighter on offense.”
The series had then been complicated in Irpinia, with Fortitudo remounted in game-3 and beaten 75-71 after dominating the first half (30-45 at halftime). Francis himself – the same player in whose contact Della Rosa suffered the injury – had been one of the protagonists of the Campania comeback with 22 points. Game-4 had also gone to Avellino, thanks to a devastating 19-2 partial in the third quarter. The series had thus reached the bella, with Caja keeping his compass: “Congratulations to Avellino, see you Sunday in Bologna. We deserved on the court to have Game 5 at home.”
The PalaDozza had responded in the most important moment: on Sunday Fortitudo overwhelmed Avellino 93-61, directing the game already in the first quarter with a 28-9 partial. “The series against Avellino was at 2-2, and this was a decidedly complicated game for us,” Caja had stressed after the game. “With the inside-out, the pressure on Fortitudo was very high. However, these guys managed to show how much they deserved the competition after how much they had worked all year long.”
Now Effe is awaiting the challenge against Verona, a team that had eliminated Brindisi in the quarterfinals with a clear 3-1 victory. Bologna had finished the regular season in third place, with a point differential of +168, behind Scafati – already promoted – and Pesaro, relinquishing the second step of the podium due to unfavorable direct clashes. On the eve of the playoffs, artificial intelligence projections had pointed precisely to Fortitudo as the team best equipped to go all the way, with an estimated 35 percent chance of promotion against the 15 percent credited to Verona. Numbers that, now, will have to reckon with the absence of a key player like Della Rosa.
