Before the match of the 8th day of the French basketball championship this Friday (8:30 p.m.) between Limoges CSP and Boulogne-Levallois, the new coach of Ile-de-France residents Vincent Collet gave us an interview. He speaks of his team but also of a formation of Limoges CSP which he fears before this meeting.
Your team is 1st in the championship with a record of 6 wins for 1 loss. Did you expect such a good start to the season?
No, I didn’t expect us to be 1st after 7 days. We hoped to win a certain number of matches but we never have any guarantees, especially since our first outing was very complicated since we lost at Le Mans in great width. But we quickly regained our spirits by taking advantage of a second match against Monaco which was not quite at the top. From there, we played pretty well in the league.
Nicolas Lang is really at his best
This Friday, the best attack receives the 2nd best defense. Can we speak of opposition of style?
I do not know. I like it when you defend well too. But clearly, Limoges defends well. We could see it during the friendly match against them at the end of the pre-season. A committed and contested match with a small score. They have since confirmed. It’s a team that bothers and apart from the Cholet match, which was a bit special, they have always been in the matches thanks to this defense. They also have a game that is well controlled. And I think they play pretty well overall. They are well organized with Nicolas Lang who is really at his best after last season where he had already shone. There, in my opinion, it is still a little step above. Afterwards, style opposition, I don’t know. I’m happy that offensively, we’re pretty good. We run a lot, we have rhythm. But we are also trying to improve our defense which sometimes is not bad.
We see that there is research, that there are a lot of special systems
For your team, which plays Europe with all the fatigue that this implies, is one of the challenges to succeed in having energy and concentration?
It is indeed very important. We are trying to achieve this and I admit that the behavior of my team last Friday at Châlons-Reims made me happy. We were coming back from Kuban, we had traveled 14 hours the day before. The players showed concentration, seriousness to prepare. To compensate for a possible lack of energy related to movement. But it’s true that it comes back every week. At some point, you are bound to let go of small things. The second issue is that by necessity, being on the road, you train less. When we are at home as is the case this week, we try to compensate a little but it smells when we observe Limoges for example. We see that there is research, that there are a lot of special systems, things that require additional work that the coach was able to put in place. For us, that will force us to find solutions and it is interesting.
I consider him a full player in our rotation
The return of Bandja Sy being premature, you have extended the medical freelance of the former Limoges CSP winger Nobel Boungou-Colo. You are happy with his contribution!
Absolutely. It’s a good thing for us. If Bandja had returned, it could not be kept but only for financial reasons. So we can keep it. He immediately integrated. It is indeed productive. I see him as a full player in our rotation. We have a rotation of 10 players. This is not too much for the two competitions. That’s why we wanted to extend his freelance. For us it’s important because it’s still 2 games a week and that will be the case for several months. So it’s important to have at least 10 confirmed players to stay the course on both competitions. We want to qualify for Eurocup. We have to be able to win games even if we know that we are going to lose quite a bit because there are teams that are more armed than us.