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“I think I can run for President of Philippines with this result,” Qatar coach Tom Wisman joked after helming the GCC champions to a 71-68 win over Chinese Taipei to upset all the calculations in Group E in the FIBA Asia Basketball Championship yesterday.
Qatar’s win while tying them with Taipei and Philippines – helped the hosts top Group E and avoid reigning champions China in the quarter-finals. Philippines thus will play against Kazakhstan and Qatar will line up against Korea with Chinese Taipei matching wits with China in the quarter-finals scheduled for tomorrow.
Qatar were well within a chance to top the Group E standings when they led by as many as 12 points – needing a 16-point to achieve that target – at one stage in the fourth quarter.“Some small and silly mistakes at that point led to cutting down our win,” said Yasseen Ismail who returned the best individual stats in a game in this competition with 20 points, 19 rebounds and 2 assists.
“Thanks to God, we won, but we wanted to win big,” the Al Rayyan forward said.
“The target was well within our reach, but we ran out of gas,” said Tom Wisman. “We wanted a win and we wanted to top the Group. We weren’t concerned about opponents,” he added. Down by a dozen midway through the final period, Taipei clawed their way back to the game levelling the scores at 68 before Daoud Musa put Qatar back with a clutch basket and Jarvis Hayes sealed the issue with a split from the foul-stripe.
“Offensive rebounds killed us,” Taipei coach Hsu Chin-Che said. Qatar out rebounded Taipei 48-32 with a 19-8 advantage on the offensive glass.
Meanwhile, It took all of two quarters and a half for Philippines to take the lead for the first time in their Group E Second Round game against Hong Kong. Even then, with the support of a capacity crowd notwithstanding, the hosts really needed a final outburst before they won the game 67-55 and clinched the top spot in the group.
Hong Kong it was indeed who had control of the exchanges and called the shots for the entire first half, having scoring the first seven points of the game.
Duncan Reid looked a monster under the basket keeping Marcus Douthit from playing his normal self. Reid pulled down 19 points, a dozen of them in defence apart from scoring 12 points.
Douthit was the Philippines’ leading scorer but looked far from comfortable while scoring his 13 points.
“’We were terrible tonight,” Philippines coach Chot Reyes said.
“I thought we had a very poor game tonight,” he added.
“I really thought we could have played a lot better tonight,” said Reyes.
“Hong Kong played a great game. They came in with a great gameplan. But we found a way to grind out this victory.”
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