When the Real Madrid-Pablo Laso schism broke out last summer, Chus Mateo, perhaps the most reputable assistant in European basketball, a guy used to always doing his job in the shadows, found himself faced with the great dilemma of his career. professional: inheriting the Real Madrid bench from who had been his 'boss'. And not provisionally as during the ACB final won against Barça. The chance of a lifetime, even if he was in the middle of a firefight.

The Madrid coach, whom Juan Carlos Sánchez, director of the section, had signed in the 2014 crisis (when Laso was stripped of his two assistants at the time, Jota Cuspinera and Hugo López), was hit by bullets from all angles. They accused him of treason, threatened to be the culprit of the end of an era, and the responsibility for each team failure fell on his back.. The stick of the cup elimination in the semifinals reaffirmed the critics, so the tie against Partizan of the maestro Obradovic was presented for Mateo -low profile, little charisma- as a true revalidation while even names were already sounding to replace him, from Sergio Scariolo to Andrea Trinchieri. What surely neither he expected was that the epic would be what would rescue him, that the heart of the locker room was going to die for him.

Although, really, it was not only that. During the series, the coach trained at the Agustiniano school, was inserting different tactical aspects that managed to revitalize the team when everything was lost with the 0-2 against, the injury of Tavares (and later those of Deck and Poirier), the sanctions and a very grown rival who only had to win one of his duels in the hell of the Stark Arena.

Real Madrid beat Partizan and reach the Final Four: “They gave us up for dead”

The most significant of all his tricks was the one in the defensive zone. as old as effective. An old-school resource, a conservative 3-2, but which had elements that made it insurmountable even for Obradovic. Chus Mateo started using it when he suffered 15 down in Belgrade, when Chacho had to raise his voice in the locker room to wake up his teammates. With the mobility of Rudy and Hezonja on the wings and the immense presence of the recovered Tavares in the center. That tactical variant changed everything: Partizan, without Kevin Punter, crashed into it again and again.

He also managed to survive the difficulties that were presented to him. With the interior game greatly diminished, he tried to get Anthony Randolph and Petr Cornelie to contribute without success. He adapted Hezonja and Rudy and, in the fifth, surprised with the presence of youth squad player Eli Ndiaye -a Spanish national-, who with his physique and energy tangled Zach Leday who had scored 25 points in the fourth.

Perhaps for all this, the most relieved of the protagonists of Wednesday's feat at WiZink was Chus Mateo. He was accompanied by his coaching staff in the press room, with Lolo Calin, Paco Redondo and Guillermo Frutos in the front row, and spoke without pending accounts before anyone and with emotion for his players, those who rescued him, since an elimination would have left him Definitively marked: «They have peeled each ball like wild boars, they have made complicated shots, they have had the patience to not stop believing and the window has opened».