Nestor Garcia expressed his impressions after the victory of the Dominican Republic over Italy in the second round of Group A of the FIBA World Cup.
At the beginning of the press conference, the Argentine pointed out that he has great respect for the Italian national team:
“We respect Italy, their players and their coach, a really fantastic coach. It is a national team with a great history. As I said before, I have a lot of faith in my players. We started a little confused, but later we found the way we should play. Andres Feliz has a high basketball IQ. We played well against one of the best teams in the world. We played our game until the end.”
Nestor Garcia also says that you should never give teams like Italy a chance, because they will always use it:
“In the first half, we tried to be close to them. Our goal was to stop their transition and thus control the game. I had to call two time-outs in the first minute because we made four mistakes, which Italy punished. You must not give a chance to teams like Italy, they will use it. This tournament goes from day to day, today’s match looked like this, we will see how the next one will look like against Angola.“
At the end, the head coach of the Dominican Republic presented an interesting piece of information related to their mutual meetings with Italy:
“Italy is the favorite in this group. We played with pride against them, we play together, we play basketball and I am very happy today. The Dominican Republic has never beaten Italy, today it happened for the first time in history.“