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The best of a game suffered, frustrating, plagued with failures and in which the outside shot barely improved a little (9 of 30 in triples), have been those last two minutes of defense and successes that have propelled Spain to its victory more difficult against the weakest team in his group, an Iranian team that for long minutes showed that with a 2-3 zone you can strip Sergio Scariolo's team .

The most important thing, of course, is that in the end Spain is classified undefeated, and the bad beginnings of the big international tournaments are not unusual for us. Many times it has been improved in successive phases. What is disturbing in this case is that, over 120 minutes, we have seen a team that is too divided between different levels of players, with two men - who in the NBA play secondary roles, although important - such as Ricky Rubio and Marc Gasol , that sometimes they have thought themselves forced to do too many things, to pull the car, to force situations. That has not helped others grow. From Friday we will see if that fracture has been resolved.

The party of the group, the one that had more at stake, was this Wednesday Puerto Rico-Tunisia, in which the North Africans had the great hope of going to the second round of the World Cup for the first time. Four minutes from the end, with 64-59 in their favor, they seemed to have a serious chance , but once again in the famous clutch time , American school teams have an advantage. It was not as scandalous as the end of the United States-Turkey, but at the moment of truth the nerves ate the Tunisians, and the Caribbean - several of them born and raised in the metropolis - kept enough cold blood, chilling triple by David Huertas and Gary Browne , to keep going.

And, opposite, the Serbia-Italy clash was that of the next two rivals in Spain. The future is hard. Serbia has everything in all positions, and that Italy has rebuilt a first-level selection, only lacking a high-level five . As an example, let's put Vasilije Micic , star of the Euroleague, who in Serbia is the modest substitute for an exceptional base, Stefan Jovic , of Bayern Munich. And what about the pivot post, with the alternation Jokic - Marjanovic ...

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