Ainars BAGATSKIS: “All thoughts on the Italy game”

The coach of the Ukrainian national team shared his views on the World Cup qualifying match against the Italian team.

“As always in the Ukrainian national team, the emotions, the work ethic are all on a special level. Everyone is in a good mood, everyone is happy to play against each other, and throughout the season it feels like the boys miss this part of their basketball life – the national team.

We had two training sessions in our home ground, Riga, and after that we traveled all day to Italy. We have 10 players in the cage because we don’t have a full roster due to some health issues.

Of course, some players have micro-traumas, the season has already started seven months ago. Nobody cares because it doesn’t matter which players are on the team, how we play, what the quality of our basketball will be is important. And full of energy, we are ready to play against Italy.

In my coaching career, I had many matches against Italian teams – clubs and national teams. I played against many players. And since June of last year we have faced the Italian team twice. In these meetings, we displayed a really high quality basketball for 16 minutes. That was enough to beat Italy in the EuroBasket finals and lose to them in Riga. But that is in the past.

There is no past and no future in professional sports. We only have today to focus on. All thoughts on the game against Italy. And again: We know the opponent’s players well, they know our squad well. But Italy will have the home advantage, all tickets for this great arena are sold out. We know why we are here, we know why we play basketball, we know that we represent Ukraine in difficult times for the country. We are ready for the match.

It’s always hard to find something new. We’re going to make some changes to the game based on what we’ve done in previous matches. It is impossible to completely change the game: you can change the details both in attack and defense. But the most important thing in basketball is the physical component. Basketball starts with the physical challenge, how you prepare your body, how aggressively you play against the opponent. on both ends of the site. This is where it all started,” Bagatskis said.

The match between Italy and Ukraine will be played on Thursday, February 23 in Livorno. The match starts at 22:00 Kiev time. Sport.ua will broadcast an online text stream of the Italy v Ukraine match.