Great hopes for a happy ending
Hello to all Euroleague fans! My name is Jacopo Giachetti and I am a playmaker for EA7 - Emporio Armani Milano. I’m very happy to have this chance to write here for you and to have a space to talk with you. This past summer was very strange for me. After seven fantastic seasons in Roma, I changed jerseys and landed here with an ambitious club in EA7 Emporio Armani Milano. I joined this new project with great enthusiasm and I feel completely involved. It was an important move for me. Everybody wants to take this club back to the top level and all of us are giving more of ourselves to be better, doing little things that make the difference at this level. We’re a team with many new players and a great coach in Sergio Scariolo, who has great experience in European basketball. This club thinks big and to be part of this project is a big honor for me. I’m very proud to help my teammates with my experience and skills. And I would like to use this opportunity to thank my general manager, Gianluca Pascucci, and my coach.
Let me tell you a little story. When I started my Euroleague experience in 2006, I entered into a completely different world. This is the top level, so different from the Italian League. Everybody here is obsessed by details and in the beginning I was totally confused, because of the level of the game, but now it is different for me! It was October 2006 and I was with Lottomatica Roma, ready to play against Partizan Belgrade, which was coached by Dule Vujosevic. It was a physical game, we won 65-60 and I played very well, finishing with 10 points and a 20 index rating. Not bad for a debut. I still remember the tension before the tipoff: they were never-ending hours. I was unable to sleep during the afternoon, I was so nervous. My dream was close to coming true and I was lucky because everything worked well after the tipoff. But I have also negative memories inside me. With the same team we suffered one of the worst defeats in Euroleague history, losing in Vitoria, 99-53, against TAU. The trip back to Rome was difficult, but that defeat gave us a great charge and we came back home with a big desire to do something important soon, and we conquered in Bologna a very important win for us in the Italian League.
This season our start has been very positive. We beat the 2011 Euroleague runner-up Maccabi Tel Aviv by playing a very good game. Despite that, we’re still a work in progress. We’re a new team that works very hard every day trying to find the right chemistry. And we have Danilo Gallinari, who’s like a cherry on top. We know our task is tough in this group, but we want to grow together game-by-game and give our best against all our opponents. We lost in Madrid, but we stayed in the game until the end and now we have the Game of the Week against Anadolu Efes coming up. They built an excellent team during the summer to be one of the protagonists of the season.
We also want to be protagonists at the top level, but I don’t want to look ahead. I prefer to look step-by-step and to build something solid. I think that is the right attitude to become better. That is what we would like to do. Coach Scariolo is a pragmatic man, very meticulous, and he knows very well what we have to do to win. The team is a great group following its coach, and means to be a solid team. In the end, our play on court will give the final verdict, but the atmosphere we breathe every day in the locker room gives me great hopes for a happy ending.
POSTED BY
JACOPO GICAHETTI - MILAN, ITALY
DATE:
Wednesday, November 02, 2011