13/10/2010,

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Hi guys, I'd love to tell you a little bit how I have lived and felt the historical victory against the Lakers.First of all it must be said that they are arrived in Europe with only one week of training done and that Kobe is at half of his possibilities, nontheless the satisfaction remains.Let's start from the beginning: as all of you surely know, after the Supercup I had to stop, to avoid a stress fracture on the left foot.It's a problem I've been having for a bunch of weeks, which has become getting worse and worse each ay passed, until it forced me to stop. This injury has obliged me not to partecipate to this event; at first I didn't care much about that because I had seen that in the previous Lakers' match, held in London, Kobe played only 5 minutes, due to a surgery on his knee made this summer.But I was wrong.Since the first minute it has been clear that it wouldn't have been an exhibition match, the first contacts between Pete and Artest were playoffs mode ones.I was on the bench and the would situation made me feeling more and more charged.These contacts are contunued for the whole match, they absolutely didn't want to lose and we were there to do our best and 100% of our possibilities.We had a drop at the end of the 3rd quarter when the american referees started to whistle only in Lakers' favour, as if they had precise orders from the NBA.We arrived at having an 11 points deficit, then the real show has started.The duel between Pete Mickael and Kobe Bryant...What a show!!!That's one of the reason why basketball is beautiful...In soccer you will never be able to see a Messi vs Cristiano Ronaldo 1on1, while in basketball you can...Pete is a hard guy, as it's said in slang "he has balls", going face to face against Kobe is not something everyone can do and would do...He did it and gave a shake to the team which at that moment had had a drop.We suddenly came back into the game, and remained there until the end.Last minutes have been awesome..The truth is that if the referee Pizarro wasn't there, we would have never been able to win it and bring victory at home. Two out of three referees were from US and the remaining one was from Spain, as you can imagine the 2 Americans in last 2 minutes kinda swallowed the whistle while our "new friend" Pizarro had the courage to call a faul against Kobe on Navarro which, with the score seeing us ahead of three points and 2 free throws to shoot with 30 seconds left, kinda decretated our victory.At the end of the match I talked a while with Kobe, and hearing the current best NBA player made me a weird effect.I wished him good luck for upcoming season and he did the same to me.In the locker rooms, after the short speech in which the coach was congratulating with us for the great match, a chaotic going and coming of people started, especially warehouse-keeper Miquel and physiotherapist Edu from our to Lakers locker room...And the fault was mine: now I explain you: I have a bigger brother called Alessandro who is a huge Lakers' fan since Magic time, 2 years ago we went to Los Angeles to play against Lakers and he was there, knows everything about them, remembers all the players, all their proveniences, all the nicknames and even how they come in at the official players speaker announciation on the court. For example, the playguard Fisher has a particular way of coming in and, when the speaker calls his name, all his teammates get down to give him five...These are detailes which are not usually noticed, but he doesn't miss a single one of them.You can imagine what happened when he knew the news about the game Barça-Lakers: he called me and said he would have come.I told him I was not sure if I was going to be on the roster for 2010-2011 season but he didn't care a lot about that: he had made yet the flying ticket. Anyway to cut short he has come with 2 Bryant's jerseys and wanted me to let him sign them. I usually sign autographs and not ask for them, so that would have let me be embarassed. I had to involve the physiotherapist who knew the Lakers' one and this way I succeeded. Anyway they told me he is a very kind person, they waited a while because he had to get massaged after the match but then he did it easily, in a way such that the warehouse-keeper after a while did another trip to get some other stuff being signed and autographed. Another thing which has surprised me has been the fact that, after that traffic in the locker room, Artest has asked to exchange jersey with Navarro: this gives you an idea about the american mentality and way of approaching sport. Few minutes ago they were hurting each other on the court, and then after having lost against a European team he asked to swap jerseys...Awesome.After that no other interesting things are happened. A vip room where to eat something and where we had to go had been prepared; we stayed there for half an hour and then we went away. In the end I can draw some conclusions: we won but they remain the best,  technically we can compete, phisically we can't and when they are in shape they are unstoppable.But for a night we can say we have been better than the Los Angeles Lakers.

BASO