By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
The first leg of the Basketball Champions League Play-In between Trapani Shark and Hapoel Netanel Holon was stopped after seven minutes in Bulgaria.
Despite recent uncertainty surrounding the club, Trapani had confirmed their participation in the series. However, the Italian side took the court with only five available players: Alessandro Cappelletti, Riccardo Rossato, Fabrizio Pugliatti, and two teenagers, Matteo Patti (born in 2007) and Francesco Martinelli (born in 2008).
The game was played in a near-empty arena, and Trapani head coach Alex Latini called a timeout. Shortly afterward, Rossato left the court, followed by Pugliatti and then Cappelletti.
As a result, Trapani were reduced to just two players on the floor, Patti and Martinelli. Play continued briefly until Patti committed his fifth personal foul, leaving Trapani with only one player available.
At that point, the referees stopped the game in accordance with FIBA regulations, which do not allow a match to continue if a team has fewer than two players. The contest was officially ended after seven minutes of play, with the score at 38–5 in favor of Holon.
“Players who went to Bulgaria spared the club a €600,000 fine”
After the game, Trapani president Valerio Antonini took to social media to comment on the match and the difficult situation the club is currently facing.
“I would like to thank the players who went to Bulgaria to make this appearance—clearly an unseemly one—which nevertheless spared the club a €600,000 fine that the BCL had notified us of in the event of a forfeit.
I also thank the FIP and the League for reducing us to these conditions by blocking registrations, not allowing the 5+5 rule, nor the registration of coach Latini, along with a whole shocking series of injustices. For these, I thank former president Garaffa for highlighting them in his statement today—an absolute disgrace that not even FIP Sicily made the slightest attempt to stop.
We have been left alone and abandoned, even by some of those who were supposed to support us and instead boycotted us in every possible way, on top of hurling indecent insults at me.
The time for the truth will come after the steps taken in these hours, and the damage you have caused us is incalculable.
STAY TUNED,” Antonini wrote on Facebook.