Avellino is overwhelmed: Attilio Caja’s lesson to Fortitudo Bologna
Fortitudo Bologna prevails over Avellino by a score of 93-61, giving respite to a chase for promotion to Serie A that had become complicated during the series against the Campani. This was underlined without mincing words also by Attilio Caja, who in the postgame put under the microscope the difficulties his team had to face and managed to overcome them.
“The series against Avellino was at 2-2, and this was a decidedly complicated game for us,” Caja stressed in the press conference. “With the inside or outside, the pressure on Fortitudo was very high. However, these guys managed to show how much they deserved the match after how much they have worked all year. We steered the game as early as the first quarter, with great defense and a 28-9 run that weighed so much.”
“Those who think that all games should be won are very wrong. In Avellino we were ahead at halftime in both games, but those who experienced those situations as tragedies don’t understand how sports works. So I want to give kudos to all of Fortitudo, because these guys were great at containing the turnovers against Avellino. A team that always puts us in trouble,” Caja added.
The road that led to the decisive victory in game-5 was anything but linear. The series had gotten off to the best start for Effe, 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 urged his team not to get excited: “We need to have few parties and reset. The real gap is not this, Avellino is a great team and we have to be ready on Saturday and definitely brighter on offense.”
The series had then gotten complicated in Irpinia. In game 3, after a dominated first half with the Bolognese ahead 30-45 at halftime, Fortitudo had collapsed in the second half, suffering a comeback that had set the score at 75-71 for Avellino, with Francis (22 points) and Lewis (21) on the shields for the Campani. Caja had singled out offensive rebounding as the decisive factor in that defeat, and he did not spare a jab at Mastellari, guilty of deliberately missing a free throw in the final period: “He decided to miss without anyone telling him, that free throw was to be scored. It wasn’t missing a second, it was missing eight.”
Even game-4 had turned out to be a wasted opportunity: Avellino had once again made the home factor count, extinguishing hopes of an early end to the series with a devastating 19-2 partial in the third quarter. Yet even at that juncture, Caja had kept his compass: “Congratulations to Avellino, see you Sunday in Bologna. We deserved on the court to have Game 5 at home.”
The PalaDozza thus responded in the most important moment, confirming its specific weight in a season in which Fortitudo had already shown that it knew how to make defense and its public two fundamental weapons. La Effe had ended the regular season in third place, with a points differential of +168, behind Scafati – already promoted – and Pesaro, surrendering the second step of the podium because of unfavorable direct clashes. Numbers that, on the eve of the playoffs, had prompted even artificial intelligence projections to indicate Bologna as the team best equipped to go all the way, with an estimated 35 percent chance of promotion. Avellino, by contrast, was credited with a paltry 1 percent: the reality of the field, as often happens, took charge of making those numbers much less clear-cut than expected.
