Paspali: “If Serbia hadn’t won the gold in Athens, we might have faltered like Croatia”

A very interesting interview about the future of Serbian basketball was granted to “meridiansport” by Zarko Paspali!

The once great glory of Yugoslavian basketball, who graced the Greek courts with his presence, spoke about the difficult conditions that prevailed in Athens Eurobasket in 1995revealing that if his country had not prevailed in the final in Lithuania, then, he would have known the… downhill like Croatia.

“We secured the right to participate in EuroBasket 1995 literally three weeks before the start of the event, at a tournament in Bulgaria, where we almost lost to the organizers. Everything else was a result of what had happened. The country fell apart, we lost the right to play, while the Croatians, who were respectively as strong and basketball-wise as us, secured the right to go to the Olympics in 1992. That national team could and should have done much more. We, on the other hand, waited, hoping that something would change. The first, the second, the third year passed… And at the same time, the situation in our country was bad, as bad as it got. Or so we thought at the time.

It was definitely a big success, but it was made ten or twenty times bigger because of what we had been through. Maybe you’re right, maybe that was the turning point for the sequel. If we hadn’t won the gold, we might have started to falter, just like the Croatians. It is obvious that they did not show enough consciousness about what a national team means. We continued to play basketball with great success, while they took a completely different direction.”