AFOLABI SAHEED OLAWALE
Head Coach of the Nigeria Women Basketball team, D’Tigress, Rena Wakama, has charged her girls to quickly put the defeat to South Korea behind them and focus on an improved performance in their game against the Philippines at the FIBA women’s World cup qualification tournament in Lyon, France.
D’Tigress lost to their Asian opponents 77-60 points in their second game on Thursday, marking the first time the Nigeria senior women basketball team is losing to the Koreans.
The Nigerian team had a closed game in the first and second quarter losing narrowly by 36-32 points but couldn’t build their usual momentum in the third and final quarter as the game slipped away from them.
Victoria Macaulay was Nigeria’s best performer after her MVP display in the first game against Colombia, scoring 22 points and 6 rebounds.
Coach Rena Wakama said there are lessons to be learnt from the defeat and praised the Koreans for their overall performance.
” Korea is a great team. We struggled today shooting the balls and we turned over the ball twenty two times which is not typical of our game”
” Mentality we are fine, and we are not going to over react to the loss . There are lessons in losses so we are going to take the lessons from this game and try to get better and be ready for our next game”.
” The Koreans were very physical , denying our passing lanes and double up on our players .They did a great job and credit to them”, Wakama stated.
South Korea is hoping to pick one of the two World cup tickets in the round robin qualification tournament to join Nigeria and Germany who had already qualified for the FIBA Women’s World cup in September in Berlin, Germany.
Both Nigeria and Germany are only taking part in the qualification competition as a preparatory tournament ahead of the World cup.
The FIBA Women’s World cup Qualifying Tournament is currently taking part in four counties – France , Turkey, Puerto Rico and China as countries fight to make the World cup.
D’Tigress next game is against the Philippines on Saturday before their last two matches against European giants France and Germany.
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