Melli's twentieth blue summer

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One of the secrets of Nicolò Melli 's success is that he doesn't waste time looking back. He's always thinking about the next step, the next conquest. The captain is in his twentieth summer with the Azzurri, even though he's had to miss a few due to injury ("As some say, let's say it's the twentieth summer gross"). Since he was a 15-year-old boy, he's known that part of his summer is dedicated to this jersey . "To convince the kids of the importance of the Azzurri jersey, I don't think there's much to say; more than anything, there are things to do. If at the end of July you give up a few holidays and show up in the mountains to train, then play a tournament and then start over with the club, you have to have something inside you. Either you have it, or after a couple of slow seasons. The national team is a natural selection. My wife and daughters know that every summer I have my time to spend with the Azzurri, at least until they call me up." Being still here after twenty years means that this child who became a man wearing the blue shirt has something special inside .

“It's not like we're meeting up in Folgaria on July 23rd to go on holiday to Cyprus. The goal is to get some satisfaction. And getting some satisfaction means winning a medal .” It would be the perfect ending to a summer that began with the girls' bronze medal and continued with the Under-20s' gold: “And now we're all cheering for the Under-18s. These successes mean the movement is healthy and the federation is working well at the youth level. Even Gigi, joking aside, is working hard.” Datome had also worked hard to bring Donte DiVincenzo to the European Championships. “The important thing is that we had a respectable Plan B in mind with Darius Thompson, one of the best in Europe at his position, a player who can help us make a qualitative leap. There's no point thinking about Donte not coming, especially since we've never played him, so it's not like we're losing anything, it's not like we need to change our game as if we suddenly had to be without Fontecchio. Let's focus on those who are here and not those who couldn't make it due to injury, because this Plan B is truly fantastic, thank you for having it .” Here's a taste of what was said at the beginning. Melli is looking ahead. He could sit on the bank and watch his enemies flow in the river, proudly shrugging his shoulders because he won the Euroleague (and also the Scudetto and the Turkish Cup) with Fener, and those who no longer wanted him in Milan won nothing, but he doesn't dig in the knife.

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“Honestly, I don't know if I missed Milan, but I certainly missed Milan because I felt good in the city and on the team, so much so that I still keep in touch with many of my teammates. I missed those colors I wore for eight years. But it's part of the game: I missed Fener when I went to the NBA, just as I missed Bamberger when I went to Fener. There's no point in going on here and saying why it ended, everyone knows what went wrong (the relationship with Messina, obviously). And then I can only say thank you because I returned to Fener and we won everything.” Especially the Euroleague. “ It's the most important trophy of my career, I'm happy to have won it because at 34, having other opportunities wasn't a given . But it doesn't change my desire to win again, to experience new emotions. I'd put the ones I felt with the Euroleague victory on par with a couple of championships, the first with Milan and the one in Germany, the first in which I had a different role.” But Melli, rather than dwelling on past successes, is thinking about his dream: “Because that's what I consider a medal with the national team. A dream. It'll be tough because to win something with the blue jersey, you also need a bit of luck. We have to be good at deserving it. This year, we also want to dedicate something special to Polonara. It's great how Pozzecco made him feel part of the project, how he's also in the team chat. But Achille must focus above all on winning his battle; that's what matters now. The strength of this group has always been unity. We get along well off the pitch, too; we're united, we're a team .”

A team that will compete in the European Championships in Cyprus in September, starting in the initial group with Greece, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Spain, and Cyprus. So here's the question that could shatter his friendship with Datome: would it be better to lose the silver medal this summer or win the bronze medal? "I have no doubt: losing the silver medal and, after the disappointment of the defeat, thinking I still have a medal worth more than a bronze. Ask Poz if he would have preferred bronze to silver at the Athens Games..." Fans of the abbracci&macine team should know that the podcast with Gigi will not return this year. "He's too important a role now to come and mess around with me on a podcast. I thought about replacing him with another teammate, but I didn't want to expose him to the fact that I'd found someone better than him." Let's let him study as president. "I won't compete with him, I'd like to play all the way to Los Angeles, but first we have to qualify." The journey into the future continues.

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