The Spanish team is making progress in its preparation plan for the Games, already overcoming the first training sessions and entering the friendly phase. The first arrives this afternoon (4:00 p.m., Four) before Iran on the Font de Sant Lluís de València.
The team held a morning training session yesterday at the WiZink Center in Madrid and then moved to Valencia, where the coach, Sergio Scariolo, made an assessment of the state of his men and the situation with a view to this meeting.
“After a little less than a week, the team is where it needs to be, far from its best form, but the work has been good, the energy, the concentration, the enthusiasm, with those feelings of creating a cohesive and competitive group. “, he pointed Scariolo. “But we are at the beginning and although we have to stop our preparation phase because we have a series of matches one after the other, I think we are in line with the plans we had.”
For the coach, this first game has to serve “to start shooting, to compete, to remove a little from the routine of always seeing the same faces in front of you, of knowing what the one in front of you is doing… It is a different stimulus compared to a non-rival. extremely well known although of course we all remember that in the world Cup He made things very difficult for us until the end. It is not the result that is of most interest in this game ”.
The coach announced that his intention is that in these first two games the 18 players called up will have minutes and with this he will get an idea of the states of form and possibilities of configuring the final team.
Pau: “Get more rhythm”
Pau Gasol agreed with the coach on the idea of taking advantage of these first matches (on Monday they will play against the same rival but in Madrid) to acquire more sensations. “You have to take advantage of these games, get more spark, more rhythm and polish to get to the championship well,” said a Gasol who explained that it is always good “to start competing and measure yourself” against other matches, more in a concentration that is ” shorter, with fewer matches, with fewer opportunities ”and before a Games in which there are only three group matches and of them you go directly to the qualifying rounds.
Rudy Fernández also pointed out that “the objective has to be to follow the dynamics that we are in these training sessions. Trying, with everything we have worked in Madrid, to make a good game tomorrow ”.
With the return of Oriola on Wednesday, the selection is already full and this Thursday had the traditional tuition dinner in which the new internationals ran the bill, as usual.
They arrive without Haddadi but with more filming
The Iranian team, classified for Tokyo 2020 as the best Asian team in the 2019 World Cup, comes to Spain after a concentration in Japan in which they lost two of their three duels against the local team (85-57 and 76-50, although they won one by 67-72). The ‘Team Melli’ does not currently have its main star, veteran center with past NBA Hamed Haddadi, who had to undergo surgery for a knee injury, but assured in May that he would do everything possible to reach the Games,