DAZNthe leading global sports streaming platform, offers from this Thursday a new installment of The Coaching Experiencewhich on this occasion seats Berni Rodríguez together with the current Zenit coach, Xavi Pascual, whose irruption in the elite took place when he took command of FC Barcelona. Six seasons after his departure from the Barça team, Pascual does not value a hypothetical return to what was his home: “Barcelona is very well trained with ‘Saras’ (Jasikevicius), they are doing very well, they have a solid project… Together with Madrid, they are the two clear contenders to win it all this year and they are doing very well on that path. I do not consider it at all, beyond that with Juan Carlos (Navarro) I think that all our lives we will have a very good relationship and we continue to have it”.
The relationship with the player
Throughout his career, Xavi Pascual has coached some of the best players in Europe. However, he highlights one above all: “Juan Carlos (Navarro) has been a guy with a brutal intellect, but the one who has impressed me the most in my life, I have to say, it’s Ricky (Rubio). Ricky arrived from Joventut with very good work behind him, very good work from the academy, but he arrived, did only one training session, and knew everything and directed everyone with only one training session, at 18 years old, I think, at the time when we signed him. A capacity for intellect in spaces and to understand things out of the ordinary”.
The current Zenit coach also discovers some of the main lines of his dressing room management: “In the end, the coach has to lead, but leading is not commanding. Sometimes you have to command, but with the voice of command everything is very easy. ‘You have to do this!’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I say so’. When it’s ‘because I said so’, it usually takes you to the immediacy, but it doesn’t take you to the future. It has to be from the conviction that you need to work, you need to continue, you need to make them understand. I’m on top of everything, I try to control everything”.
For Xavi Pascual, one of the most difficult moments for coaches is when veterans begin to lose their performance, given that the coach-player relationship begins to change: “The player becomes a former player when ‘the candle is over’, and there is a moment when it ends. There are moments when it ends and the player thinks that the ‘candle is still lit’. That is the only time when the relationship is a little more complicated, you have to make them understand that they have had an extraordinary sports career, but the time has come where… The transition is not easy”.
The current basketball
In the opinion of the Catalan coach, the current measurements of the basketball court should continue as they have been up to now: “There is too much talk, I think. The track is what it is, the lines are what they are, and I think the game is very good like this… Because if we start discussing how to score more points, I think we make the hoop bigger. Now, people are more adapted to the line and I think the basketball we have now is very nice”. Asked if he is missing the low post game, Xavi Pascual offers his opinion on The Coaching Experience: “There are few low post players. The way competitions are, you don’t have much time to teach. The Euroleague, for example, which is a competition where everything goes ball by ball, when you put it in thereyou think that the one who is going to play it has many options of being able to insert it or be able to generate it”.
your greatest satisfaction
Pascual has a long career in basketball, both in his training stage and among the ‘great’ Europeans. For this reason, he highlights in this exclusive DAZN content his greatest satisfaction as a coach: “That evolution between the moment you see the rival, you analyze it, you think ‘this way I can beat him’, you set up your party plan, you execute your party plan and it goes well. All that process gives you a lot. And the second is when the player who comes to you with a level ‘x’, level ‘5’, ends up with you at level ‘8’, and goes to another better club, or goes to the NBA, as I have had the fortune to help many players to go to the NBA during my career”.
