Until the end, Vincent Collet believed in it, and he was right! To care since the beginning of the preparation of theFrench team at the World Cup, Mathias Lessort obtained permission to join Jakarta to participate in the competition. For a month, the new interior of Panathinaikos treated a sprained ankle, and he even made a round trip to Greece. But the hard work has paid off, and he is definitely one of the 12.
You are going to welcome Mathias Lessort to the group in Jakarta, can you come back to his program while the team went through training and matches?
He was in pure rehabilitation for the first fifteen days of prep and then he started re-athletics. For a good week now, he has been playing basketball. He trained individually [du côté de Levallois, sous les ordres de l’ancien assistant Laurent Foirest notamment] and even, in recent days, collectively. He’s already arrived in Jakarta, so he’s ahead of us. We will see him on Tuesday evening, and Wednesday for the first big training session on site. I’m thinking of using it on Friday [face au Canada], It was the goal ! We consider that he has the qualities to help the group and complement our other interiors. We don’t have a guarantee yet, we’ll see first on Wednesday in training.
Read >>> Interview with Mathias Lessort
Do you think he can, at least in part, remedy one of the recurring problems of the team currently: the defensive rebound, which we have been talking about since the games in Orleans?
Mathias is a strong rebounder so he will probably help us. In any case, he has the capabilities to help us stabilize our defensive rebound. But there were efforts glimpsed yesterday, which we must continue. There has been a beginning of change in behavior, but it needs to be confirmed. We will continue to insist on this in training on Wednesday and Thursday and I hope that we will manage to progress, because it will be one of the major challenges of the match against Canada, which is a strong team in offensive rebounding, and which causes a lot of stray balls to the opponent. These will be two essential factors for winning this match.
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