MADRID, 12 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of the Spanish Sports Federation for People with Physical Disabilities (FEDDF), Enrique Álvarez, acknowledges that “expectations are high” with the women’s team that is competing in the Dubai Wheelchair Basketball World Cup, where they will try to be in the quarterfinals and with a view to fine-tuning his set-up for the European Championships in August where his chances of being in the “tremendously expensive” Paralympic Games will be at stake.
“It is true that the expectation is very high because after all we are seeing an immense capacity for work, a defensive capacity of this team that has ostensibly improved the great work that Adrián Yáñez did in his day. We go without expectations of results, but I do have high expectations in terms of seeing a new team,” Álvarez told Europa Press.
The leader knows that they will surely have to make “a new type” of play by not having Vicky Pérez, pregnant with twins, in their ranks, and that she is “the best player or the highest scorer” of the national team, so they will bet on “Perhaps a somewhat different style” with the new coach, Franck Belen, with whom he hopes there will be “an important change”.
Enrique Álvarez does not forget that they are coming to this World Cup after “the great feat of getting a bronze in the last European Championship in Madrid” and that the event can also serve them “a bit of preparation” for the European Championship in August where they will play “clearly” the options to be able to repeat presence in the Paralympic Games in Paris next year, something for which he is “optimistic” despite the fact that it will be “tremendously expensive” by dropping the participants from twelve to eight.
The president of the FEDDF sees the elected group as “super united” and with “a better atmosphere than ever.” “Illusion is the most important thing. We are somewhere between the super elite and the middle class and in the end we have always lacked that ‘point’ of having some taller players, which may be a bit of our handicap compared to others countries. However, we supplied it with a capacity for work, with enthusiasm and with a really superlative defensive capacity”, he stressed.