The Spanish national team won the rating - Newspaper Kommersant No. 173 (7374) of 09/20/2022

The Spanish national team won the rating - Newspaper Kommersant No. 173 (7374) of 09/20/2022



The next European Basketball Championship brought the fourth title obtained at the continental championships to the Spanish team, which beat the French in the final match - 88:76. The Spaniards won gold despite the fact that just before this tournament, unlike the previous ones, they were not quoted very highly due to serious personnel losses.

The head coach of the Spanish national team Sergio Scariolo, who has experienced many ups and downs in his long career, as it turned out, carefully studies what various sources write about him, about his team, including, for example, the official website of the championship. And after the final, he remembered how, from the point of view of his experts, the balance of power before the tournament looked like. The Spaniards in this hierarchy were sent only to eighth place.

Scariolo talked about this without resentment, which would be almost natural for a mentor, strictly speaking, the strongest team on the continent in this century. And the Spanish national team, in fact, has no competitors in the struggle for such a status - the track record describes it exhaustively. It now has four titles of the winner of the European Championship (the previous ones were won in 2009, 2011 and 2015 years), two - winners of world championships, 16 years and three years ago, and a whole stack of awards a little lower in dignity. In general, it seems strange to lower a team with such a background into the basement of the top ten.

But Scariolo understood, of course, that in this particular case, the background did not matter. But the losses suffered by the national team in recent months - after last year's Olympics in Tokyo, where the Spaniards performed neither shaky nor rolls, already in the quarterfinals, running into the favorites of the Americans and leaving the race, had it. Almost none of the basketball players, who for years, and sometimes almost decades, personified Spanish power and brilliance, reached the European Championship, scattered across four countries - the Czech Republic, Georgia, Italy and Germany, neither Pau Gasol with his brother Mark, nor Ricky Rubio, neither Sergio Yul nor Sergio Rodriguez: someone retired due to age, someone was let down by injuries. And Rudy Fernandez, a fragment of the “golden era”, who reached the European Championship, at 37 could already play only episodic roles. The functionality of this detachment went to those who until recently could not be imagined as a full-fledged replacement for the leaders.

This Spanish line-up looked more modest than ever. Especially against the background of the compositions of some rivals, who were rushed to the aid not just by good players from the NBA, but by the superheroes of this league - Serbian Nikola Jokic, Greek Giannis Antetokoumbo, Slovenian Luka Doncic.

And Scariolo was well aware that formally they have the right to hang a label on his team such that, for example, huge problems in attack will inevitably await, which lacks brightness to seriously claim the champion title. But he also understood something else. Basketball is primarily a collective game, and generosity and selflessness can compensate for the lack of gloss. Especially if, feeling the importance of the moment, those who were dragged into frontmen by circumstances jump over their heads - NBA players Willy and Juan Hernangomes, naturalized in order to close the problematic position of the point guard, American Lorenzo Brown, who at the beginning of the year conducted the attacks of Kazan UNICS.

And the stake on "teamwork", on the feeling of the elbow fully justified itself. The teams built around superheroes left the championship without reaching the medal showdown. The Serbs and Jokic were eliminated by the Italians in the 1/8 finals, in the next stage, losing to the Germans and Poles, the Greeks came down from Antetokoumbo and the Slovenes from Doncic. Meanwhile, the Spaniards, meanwhile, were moving forward not so much in terms of class as in character, on leadership inclinations that really hatched in Hernangomes, in Brown. This is an amazing fact.

In the course of all three play-off matches on the way to the final, the Spanish national team lagged behind their opponents - Lithuanians, Finns, Germans - by at least ten points, but when they were going, they pulled themselves out of the swamp.

The final against an even French team that had enough celebrities in the application, such as Rudy Gobert or Evan Fournier, however, turned out to be a story of a completely different kind. In it, the Spaniards immediately took the bull by the horns and immediately began to break away - thanks to Willy Hernangomes, tireless in the fight under the shields, recognized as the best player in the championship, thanks to his brother Juan, who played the match of life, who refused to miss because of the three-point arc (seven out of nine long-range shots were made) , thanks to Brown's wisdom and general discipline. Back in the second quarter, Spain's reserve reached 21 points. It seemed to guarantee victory, but it became a confirmation that it is harmful for this Spanish variant to feel its own superiority, to relax. Soon the French were side by side and, perhaps, already assumed that they had achieved a turning point. But finding themselves in their element - when you have to fight every second, for every point - the Spaniards pulled themselves together and got to the most unexpected gold in the history of the national team.

Alexey Dospekhov



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