Varese started the championship with two defeats

Not è started in the best way the season of Varese Basketball, which in the first two games of the season, both in the championship, lost to Brescia away and to Tortona in front of the friendly public. Waiting for the Red and White is now Trento, one of the five leading teams in Serie A: a difficult opponent for the team coached by Herman Mandole, although the Argentine coach è confident.

“This week we have worked well,” he said; “we have had no physical problems and I have seen a team with a desire to improve, especially in the defensive aspect, which has become aware of the fact that without defense you go nowhere. The games we lost against Brescia and Derthona taught us this, and all the guys know that by improving in this respect, we can have our say as a team”.

“Sunday against Trento I expect a race with a high pace becauseé they, like us, play fast; I believe that the team capable of making the best defense” will win,” added Mandole, arguing that improvements in defense may be the key to grabbing the first points of the season.

“I have confidence that my guys will be able to play a better game from a defensive standpoint but what is important è that we will have to put our heads together in defensive rebounding, an aspect on which we have particularly focused this week and which, if it works, will increase our winning percentages” he then concluded.

Jannik Sinner and Tomas Machac faced off in Miami

.

Starring in the first of the two Shanghai Masters 1000 semifinals (the other will face Novak Djokovic and Taylor Fritz), Jannik Sinner and Tomas Machac are no strangers to each other. The two, on the contrary, have faced each other quite recently, specifically at the quarterfinal level of another 1,000-point tournament, that of Miami.

Last March 27, the current world No. 1 and the newly crowned Olympic mixed doubles champion (along with the other Czech tennis player Katerina Siniakova) in fact took the court to vie for a place in the semifinals of the tournament in the South Florida metropolis: it was Sinner who won, 6-4, 6-2 in one hour and thirty-three minutes of play.

In that match Machac è was only up twice, 3-2 in the first set and 1-0 in the second. That victory, by the way, bore well for Sinner, who went on to win the Miami tournament by beating Daniil Medvedev in the semifinals and Grigor Dimitrov in the finals, also in those cases by two sets to none.

Returning to Shanghai, Jannik Sinner is looking for victory number 19 in his last 21 singles outings, from the Montreal tournament to date.The only two losses came in the quarters of the Canadian tournament against Andrey Rublev and in the final in Beijing against Carlos Alcaraz, a victory that eluded the South Tyrolean only in the third-set tiebreak.

Flavio Roda full-court press

Italian winter sports are healthy, and Fisi president Flavio Roda cannot but be satisfied with that. “Right now our athletes are important both as quality and as numbers and then because they compete in so many different disciplines. And this perhaps è the most important thing ever“ exclusively tells Sportal.it on the sidelines of the media day.

“I always tell our boys that they have to be sì good athletes, they have to be try to get results, but first of all they have to be an example for young people: their attitude and their way of posing è fundamental” he adds.

When Alberto Tomba quit there was a fear of backlash, instead the movement è still more solid and ambitious than it once was. “Many were bewildered, there were those who were convinced that there would be no tomorrow. But instead…” says Roda proudly.

Closing on Coni president Giovanni Malagò. “Coni è the federation of all federations, so you have to have a capacity and knowledge of the entire Italian sports system, of all the various federations: plus he è he è very attentive to the athletes and this is not è little: we are going towards a home Olympics that will really be a great opportunity for Italy, it would be a pity not to have at the head of what è the highest body of sport a person who is competent and who has the love for sport and for athletes as he has shown in these years Malagò”.