Pedro Martínez and the Opener With No Film: Real Madrid Relearns the Basics

Tonight in Abu Dhabi, when the clock hits 19:00 Central European Time, a basketball game will tip off in which both benches are missing the most valuable tool of the trade: film. Pedro Martínez sat in front of the cameras and said something I have heard a hundred times in this job, except that this time it carried no modesty at all. "We go a little blind." Real Madrid, a club whose players every European basketball fan can name, will play a game in which they do not know what kind of basketball the opponent will play.

It is the EuroLeague Super Cup. A short tournament with no standings, no return leg, no knockout round waiting behind it. Win and you lift a trophy. Lose and next week you start again from zero. Technically speaking, this is a fixture with almost zero transferable value: a one or two game sample says nothing about anyone's chances of winning Europe.

Which is exactly why it is the right window to read a new head coach. Real Madrid's opponent tonight is Dubai Basketball, a club from the Gulf carrying a brand-new head coach and carrying precisely what analysts call "no film". No film means you cannot guess their sets, cannot know who holds the ball in the fourth quarter, cannot predict their substitution rhythm. Martínez said it plainly: "We do not have footage of their new coach."

For a man who has just taken the hot seat at a big club, this is close to an ideal situation — not to win, but to introduce himself. He can talk about his system with nobody able to check it against reality. He can promise without being accountable immediately. He can defer every judgement with a single sentence: these things take time.

And that is exactly what he said.

What stands out: across the entire press availability, not one player was named. Not one number. Not one diagram. Pedro Martínez did not mention five-out spacing, did not mention switching, did not mention a single action. He spoke about four things so old-fashioned people assume they are obsolete: select shots well, avoid turnovers, win the defensive rebound, and hold firm on your own glass. "We try to focus more on what depends on us rather than on the opponent."

Based on my own experience watching EuroLeague games, I read that line as a variance-reduction problem. In a one-off knockout game, what kills the favourite is not a stronger opponent but an asymmetry in possessions. Winning the defensive rebound does two jobs at once: it denies second-chance points and it cuts your own transition volume. Turnover suppression works the same way — every giveaway is a free possession handed to someone else. Good shot selection is another way of saying shot-quality control. It sounds dry, but it is insurance.

The core insight sits here: those four principles do not describe a style of play, they describe a safe floor. A new head coach who has not finished installing his system lays that floor first — fewer errors, fewer turnovers, fewer easy points conceded — and only then layers complexity on top. There is nothing conservative about playing that way; it shows a staff building in the correct order.

His refusal to name a single player is a signal too. In a pre-tournament press conference, a coach who talks about the system and never about a star is deliberately refusing to fix a hierarchy. He does not want any player thinking the job is already his. He said: "Expecting that to be from the first day and for everything to go perfectly... surely won't be that fast." That sentence is a confession: the system is not installed, and he knows it.

The court has a voice — and it has never stopped singing. Tonight that voice will speak through the bounce of the ball on hardwood, the squeal of rubber soles, the whistle of the officials. But it will not speak through the thing I am most used to hearing: the sound of film replaying in my head.

Russia taught me that despair is its own kind of ascension. In the summer of 2026 in Saint Petersburg, I stood in the stands and watched a Belgian fan bury his face in his hands after an Eden Hazard dribble past three defenders, then suddenly laugh out loud as if he had just been forgiven. I do not remember the score. I remember the way a stranger wept alongside me for ninety minutes. Basketball has moments like that too, except it does not give you ninety minutes to prepare your emotions. It takes you from 0-0 to 88-85 in forty minutes and demands that you understand immediately.

But here is where I part company with the crowd. What he calls going blind is a temporary fix dressed in the language of a strategy. It is correct tonight, and it stops being correct from the first EuroLeague round, once the film thickens week by week. An 18-team season does not allow anyone to focus entirely on themselves. At this level, opponent preparation is a core competitive weapon: knowing how a team substitutes in the third quarter, who likes the right corner, who fouls early. Skipping it is a loan, not a philosophy.

And there is one small detail I cannot ignore. Martínez said: "when we played the Final Four and when we were league champions". That "we" is Valencia, not Real Madrid. It may be translation drag. It may be memory that has not changed shirts yet. Either way it reveals something: a coach carrying success from somewhere else into a place that demands success immediately finds that patience is both a professional truth and a shield. Both things are real, and there is no need to choose.

Every time Lạch Tray calls, I notice I have aged another part of a year. European basketball calls me differently: it calls with a game I cannot attend and leaves me to imagine it. Tonight I will not be in Abu Dhabi. I will be in Hải Phòng, watching a screen, listening to the breathing of a season that has not started yet.

The ghostly applause of that summer still echoes inside me, like an unfinished poem. Tonight's game will be the same: a poem not yet written, and perhaps nobody truly wants it finished. Because if it ends too soon, there is nothing left to wait for — no more film to watch, no more system to install, no more coach to believe that he simply needs more time.