It wasn’t enough. One more step was enough, one more help, one doubling moreover, to bring home the victory. It was enough, but it’s a lot, for this one Varese Basketball falls 77-86 against Reyer Venezia at home and remains stuck with just two victories after 9 league games.
That little was enough that is a lot, because it would mean disavowing the dogmas of a philosophy that clashes Sunday after Sunday with a team reality that is far from what the desired idea of the game may beso much so that this, with Venice, has even failed in many situations, creating a hybrid of a team that has lost itself.
In fact, in Masnago we saw a Varese team unable to attack in the first seconds of the action, forced to play against Venezia’s deployed defence; unable to run in transition except on occasion thanks to the tears of Matteo Librizzicapable of reviving the team from the abyss of -14 into which it had fallen halfway through the third quarter; incapable of sustaining a physical fight under the basket made decisive by the philosophical impossibility of making a blessing doublingbecause the rule of: “better to risk taking a two-pointer than leaving the man free from the arc and taking a triple“, it’s a shame that Venezia, a team that is certainly not deadly from beyond the arc but rather much more physical and statuesque under the boards, has made the key to the match.
And then again, a Varese that continues to be entangled in the unknown Jaylen Hands who even with Sykes next to him continues to have the ball in his hands too much and for whom there is no half-play that allows him to take a shot with his feet on the ground; then the character of a team that arrives at the match after a two-week break for the national teams inexplicably discharged more in the head than in the legs and who gets dragged into the match that Venezia had hoped to build from the beginning, tired after the cup efforts on Thursday.
And you might think that the defensive phase has improved, and in some situations it really has, but then you concede 86 points and you see that such are not 100 or more just for the fewer offensive possessions left to the opponents and not for a real step forward in their own half of the pitch, victim of errors and banal lapses in concentration that are still too frequent (read the 11 points conceded in 1′ at the end of the second quarter).
Despite everything, however, very little was needed to bring home this match, that little however, we repeat, still remains a lot and is independent of Mandole o Bialaszewski (is it now clear to everyone that the faults of last season were far from the responsibility of the Buffalo coach?), and it has become too repetitive to underline and highlight it: the form of Pallacanestro Varese is this and will remain so, perhaps even at the cost of pay a very high price in a game that certainly, up to now, has not been worth the candle at all.
Alessandro Burin
