Messina: My players deserve to relax and enjoy a great win

Olimpia Milan coach Ettore Messina talks after the big road win against Real Madrid.

“We have so much respect for Real Madrid, and we knew that they were coming out very aggressive. Two teams that were missing key players, and I think everybody in my team made a step forward. Of course, we are very pleased. I think we never won here as a club or it maybe happened once many years ago. It is a big win for us and now we need to regroup. We are a little bit short in the rotation because we have two big games next week, as always. My players deserve to relax and enjoy a great win, and the coaches will go back and watch film. I think that so far, we are playing a very good EuroLeague. We dropped a couple of games at home that everybody expected us to win, probably including us, but the visiting team came, played hard and won. But we have won here, in Istanbul, against Bayern… we are doing well, I think. Our goal is always to make the playoffs. It is going to be very hard, because the competition is extremely high, but we will see. We will go game by game and see what happens.”

“Of course, I want to congratulate my players. They played a really complete game. Two teams with important absences faced each other, and my players managed to give a little bit more to step up for these missing players. After last week, in which we were killed on the boards, we won on rebounds tonight and that is very important. It gave us confidence in certain moments of the game.”