Four days to the end of the regular season and Acqua S.Bernardo is preparing to face a treacherous trip to the PalaGesteco. In fact, several big names such as Trapani, Forlì and Turin have fallen on the Cividale pitch. Furthermore, Gesteco can also boast the record of being the only team in the championship still unbeaten in the scheduled phase. The blue and whites will therefore try to break this positive streak in the match scheduled for Saturday 30 March at 8.00 pm.
THE OPPONENTS – At the helm of Gesteco there is always coach Stefano Pillastrini, already the best coach of the last A2. The team’s top scorer has also been confirmed from last season: the Argentinian Lucio Redivo, third best player in the red group in terms of evaluation in the first round and who is now averaging 15.8 points. In recent releases, the playmaker born in 2003, Nicolò Isotta, has shared the directing duties with him. The starting winger’s department is completed by one of the most interesting young players in the championship: 2005 Leonardo Marangon who doubled his statistics in the clock phase, confirming his great potential. The pair of big men, formed by Giacomo Dell’Agnello and Gabriele Miani, were also the protagonists of an excellent season: both guarantee over 6 rebounds per game, to which they add 8.5 and 10.3 points on average respectively. To improve the quality of the squad, the Friulian club has unleashed a great coup in Doron Lamb: a player with a history in the NBA and in the top Italian league. Coach Pillastrini has entrusted him with the role of sixth man, which the American guard is playing with a haul of 12.3 points scored per game. Always starting from the bench, the winger Martino Mastellari, 8 points on average, and the center Matteo Berti, who in the second phase is bringing 7.5 points and 6.3 rebounds per game, also guarantee an important contribution. The rotations of the gialloblù are finally completed by the point guard Eugenio Rota and the big man Luca Campani.
COACH CAGNARDI’S COMMENT – “It will be a complicated match, but at this point in the championship it is almost useless to repeat it, because every team now has important objectives. Cividale is the only unbeaten team in the scheduled phase, coming off 6 victories in a row and having already taken the scalps of Turin and Trapani. Yet, it is a team that doesn’t even have the certainty of saving itself and is in a range of the standings where two points more or less could change the meaning of the entire season. We will find a team that is mentally focused and is playing on the wings of confidence, but that still has that hunger which at home makes it a very difficult opponent to face. We know it and by now there should be no more surprises from this point of view. We need these two points, as much as they do, to achieve our goals. The match against Verona gave us the confidence of victory and brought us out of a complicated moment in which we couldn’t win. We also saw some decent things on the pitch, but we have to follow up on all this. They are a particular team and coached by a coach like Pillastrini, who has given a good identity to his team: they have a very fast and choral game, they approach the match with small quintets and therefore we expect a very physical match”.
INFO – The match will be visible live on LNP Pass, a streaming platform for subscribers only; while the radio commentary will be broadcast on the FM frequencies of Radio Cantù 89.600 (Lombardy) and on the radiocantu.com website.
