Five of the seven remaining first round matches in the Endesa League are against rivals for the Cup; in Europe remain the group’s two most difficult outings
UCAM has been scalded in its last three appearances in the Endesa League. They have lost in their last three games, all games they have played since the last break through the FIBA windows. Even assuming the only game Sito Alonso’s team has won since then, the ‘Champions League’, the Murcians have lost all first quarters with a cumulative difference of 46 points and an average of 11.5.
To make matters worse, it has lost Jordan Davis, one of its key players, for about a month and a half, while Trice and Radovic have been absent for one game each, while Luther is still in a dry dock where he was before the break, one that UCAM started with their best game of the season, the victory at the Palacio against Joventut, which makes the current panorama even more disturbing.
And, with everything, perhaps the worst is yet to come for the university team. At least it’s what a calendar says that gets more complicated as the weeks go by. And it is that in these months of December and January UCAM has seven Endesa League matches ahead of it with which it will close the first round and in which, with the idea of the Copa del Rey taken from its head, it will have to be defeated in five of them measured against teams currently in the top eight of standings, having a ticket for the Badalona Cup match. Four of these rivals are also among the top five.
Of the only two matches Sito Alonso’s men will play against teams currently behind them in the standings, UCAM will have the first next Saturday, when they host Betis at the Palace in a match marked as dramatic to don’t fill the patience. of a fan, the Murcian, who is present in amazement at the staging that his team does in the last matches and, as if scripted, leaves the match already condemned in the first part when the clash is played far from Murcia. The other, the visit to Fuenlabrada on the seventeenth and last day of the first round.
After giving up in Vitoria, Sito analyzed his team’s progress in a disturbing manner and unlike what he usually projects before matches. “Real Madrid and Baskonia are not teams we can compete against, especially when we are not at home,” the university coach was surprised, acknowledging that “when we are playing for five minutes, it seems as if the world has fallen on us” , says the coach, referring to “the problems we’ve had”, referring to the injured and warning that “we will suffer until we restore the confidence we need to have in each of us to do things better on a collective level ” . Sito Alonso, yes, he said he was “convinced” to achieve it.
But time is running out and the calendar even more so. If Real Madrid and Baskonia are not teams in the UCAM league at the moment, the corners coming up are the most dangerous. After taking on a falling Betis (who just won in extra time in Granada), Sito’s men will repeat at home against Gran Canaria, who have won seven of their ten games. They will also visit Unicaja, third with the same balance as the Canary Islands, receive Tenerife, the league leader with only one defeat, and travel to Bilbao, eighth. To top it all off, he receives Barça at the Palace for that last game on the field of Fuenlabrada.
For now, tomorrow UCAM will have to defend its leadership of group A of the ‘Champions’ in Strasbourg, a rival with which it shares a balance of three wins and one defeat and a clash whose winner will surely be the team that avoids the poisoned ‘play- in’, a five-game tie between seconds and thirds that will take place in January to stay alive or say goodbye to the competition.
And it is that the calendar has also been erratic in the ‘Champions League’. UCAM’s two remaining matches in the group stage are away from home and after playing in France tomorrow, they have one last day in Turkey in two weeks, where a strengthened Tofas will be waiting for Sito Alonso’s team.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
