“This game showed once again that basketball is a great game” – Itoudis after beating Zenit

CSKA head coach Dimitris Itoudis after the victory over Zenit in the fourth game of the United League final, VTB said he wanted to congratulate both teams, as the match turned out to be very spectacular.

Friday CSKA won “Zenith in the second overtime with a score of 111:110. The score of the series up to four wins was 3-1 in favor of the army team, the fifth match will be held on May 30 in Moscow.

– Congratulations to the team for this victory. In general, I want to congratulate both teams, Chavi [Хавьера Паскуаля] and her children too. I left the field early, I didn’t want to be nervous when the referees made a decision on the last ball, and when I came back there was nothing. This match showed once again that basketball is a great game. We did everything to win in regulation time, we did a great job, but we made a lot of mistakes at the end. We did not make a mistake, at +6 we should have exchanged and succeeded. They paid their price. There were a lot of different decisions in this match, but we fought, we went through this difficult path.

And I congratulate the players for doing so. There were a lot of emotions in this match, arguments, technical faults… It’s the final, here the tension is at its peak. I think we deserved to win even in regulation time in terms of quality of play. At the end of Billy [Бэрон] scored very important goals and allowed his team to go into extra time. At the same time, we understand that it’s a great victory, but it doesn’t bring us the title. But we fought with an adversary, with the circumstances. This match was a good lesson for us. In particular, how should we play defense against individual basketball players, how should we deal with Zenit’s creative play, their system. We have to learn from that and play well next time.

I hope this match was watched by many people in Russia and Europe. I want to thank the fans for the good atmosphere, especially the CSKA fans, who helped us a lot. I don’t know how many of them were in the arena, but they were heard. I hope that in the fifth game in Moscow we will have a lot of spectators and we will have another great game.

The most valuable thing for me, for my team, is the reaction to the last defeat. We really weren’t very good in the third game against Zenit. Probably, they felt too comfortable after the spirit of home wins and didn’t play at their level. We watched the video, we criticized ourselves, we paid attention to certain details. We were more focused, made some defensive adjustments and created more space. Overall we were just a different team,” Itoudis said.

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