In today's sport pages, RP Team coach Yeng Guiao was guardedly optimistic, saying we had a fair chance of earning one of the three FIBA-World championship slots at stake. He also said that we had a good chance of going to the semifinals and a great chance of advancing to the quarterfinals.Really? Seriously? Now, I'm all for hope and optimism and all that jazz but after the Jones Cup, I am simply not as optimistic as Yeng Guiao.
Sure, we'll make it out of our group. But we are expected to. After all, no one expects Sri Lanka to actually beat us. But if we lose to Korea and Japan like we did in the Jones Cup, our next opponent may well be Iran, who beat us by 25 points without breaking a sweat. Then where will we be?
For us to actually have a chance of advancing to the semifinals, we need to finish first in our so-called "Group of Hope". That way, we get to face either Uzbekistan or Chinese Taipei (who also beat us by about 10 points in the Jones Cup).
If we don't do that, then we can chalk this team up as just the latest in a series of heartbreaking mishaps in the increasingly dimming Philippine basketball scene.
2 comments:
puro lang kasi pormahan ang nangyayari......macho kasi ang dating daw......this makes the players think in a very amateurish and "kanto-tambay" way..oh well....why do have to force ourselves to excel in a game where we are the elves? why not concentrate more on sports that doesnt make our being vertically challenged a disadvantage.
Too true. There's a lot to be said about the mentality of the Pinoy basketbolista. We are so enamored with the NBA/American playground model of one-on-one, toe-to-toe basketball that we would rather go one on three on a fastbreak (as Gabe Norwood tried to do in the Iran game) rather than slow it down and wait for help. Every other NBA, PBA and PBL player would do the same thing. European and South American players wouldn't.
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