• Fight The intrahistory of the wild tangana in the WiZink

Of everything that happened in Madrid vs Partizan, which will be talked about for a while, there are two things that are worth highlighting. The first is how unfair sport can be, when a brilliant career of Sergio Llull, full of stellar moments with Madrid and the national team, seasoned with that unpleasant pepper of injuries, happily overcome, returning to the path of his victories, medals, last shots ... It will be nuanced for a while by a loss of papers that almost nobody expected.

We are afraid that he will sleep badly for a while, that he will want to hit the rewind button. The other issue, and this one much deeper, is that there, on the parquet floor of the Palace, there were not two teams, with two coaches, with their records of victories and defeats, with their predictions of favorites ... What goes.

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Euroleague.

Obradovic's penultimate mission challenges Real Madrid: "30 years later, he's still a basketball madman"

  • Writing: LUCAS SÁEZ-BRAVO

Obradovic's penultimate mission challenges Real Madrid: "30 years later, he's still a basketball madman"

In this tie, and in what remains of Euroleague this year, while Zeljko Obradovic is present, what are cited are characters of his plot, actors, actresses chosen by him to star in his masterpiece of theater.

Zeljko's history in European basketball has reached a level of mastery, leadership, imposition of his personality in an environment, that others do not participate in a basketball game, but figure in his history for the History Books.

The most obvious thing to support this reflection is what we already imagined was going to happen in the press conference after the game without final.

Zeljko addresses all of us, Spanish citizens who love basketball, and in perfect Spanish, with that leave and tone that only a genius can modulate at will, he calms us in a Shakespearean way. "I am going to personally ensure that the people in Belgrade are calm, that Madrid are received as they deserve, with the recognition of this great club that I love so much."

Of all the stories that we have heard our admired Jorge Valdano tell all these years (a boy who played football like Luis Miguel slept with Ava Gardner, so that he could tell it later to friends), the one that has always been our favorite is that of his first match against Johan Cruyff, already a veteran at the time.

At one point, and fed up with what he was seeing, full of that absurd youth that invades us all at some point, he went to the genius and asked him if it was not better for the game to be played with two balls; one in Cruyff's possession, and the other so that the rest of the pariahs in his plot could have fun for a while.

The only question that journalists failed to ask Obradovic after the unpleasant end of the game, and after witnessing in this series how he has been able to make his team go out, for example, to play a minute after a timeout has ended, and after receiving three warnings from the referees: that he has managed to get the referees to return a change that the table had denied him; that he has managed to get Punter to create Stephen Curry and Matías Lessort to think he is Shaq O'Neal; that I do not know how many fans have been brought from Belgrade, each one less educated in someone else's house, all shirtless, with warrior flags, enjoying the WiZink Center as one who enjoys the wasteland in a foreign town and in their fields at dawn after a funny drunkenness ...

The only question they failed to ask, and perhaps it is not too late, is that of the lighting technician in front of the stage manager: "Zeljko: where do you want us to put the spotlights for the last dance?"

And the answer will be, logically, similar to that of Cruyff to the young Valdano. "Zeljko is all about you"...

And we have a lot that the lord of European basketball still wants to continue making us dance a few more years ...

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