An unprecedented chance for Australians
The Australian national basketball team has never in its history climbed the podium of a truly representative international tournament - unless, of course, the Championships of Oceania and Asia are considered as such, in which players from the Green Continent have won a total of 20 sets of gold medals.
The team closest to getting into the medal three was at the Olympics, where four times lost in fights for bronze. The last time this happened three years ago in Rio de Janeiro, when a bright, balanced, played and masterful, with three NBA champions in the squad of Andrei Lemanis suffered a painful defeat from the Spaniards with a difference of only one point.
At the World Championships, Australians have historically performed worse, and for the first time in the current tournament in China, they reached the semifinals. There they again had to meet with “Red Fury”: an extremely uncomfortable opponent, traditionally adding in the course of any competition and reaching the peak of form precisely to the decisive playoff matches. If Andrew Bogut and his comrades were able to take revenge, they would be guaranteed to become national heroes regardless of the outcome of the final. But at the most important moment of the championship of the planet, Australia trembled, in an incredibly dramatic duel with two additional five-minute periods, laying down arms in front of the European team.
During the first in the queue of the semi-final confrontation, it seemed that his fate was wholly and completely in the hands of the Australian team, for many leaders of which the current planetary forum could be the last in his professional career. Wards Lemanis literally dominated the shields (they made as many as 20 rebounds in an attack against nine from Spain), found on the bench X-factor represented by forward Nick Kay, who issued a double-double of 16 points and 11 rebounds, and by the middle of the third quarter they achieved double-digit advantage in the long run. It seemed that the most experienced Sergio Scariolo, who led the “Red Fury” to the medals of all tournaments except the 2010 World Cup, did not know what he could change and what he should do to save the wards from a fiasco.
But in the end, the eminent Italian specialist made a series of decisions that turned the meeting upside down, and, most importantly, forced the Spanish team to engage in maximum defense. His team did not stop losing the selection, but defended simply masterfully. The Europeans put crazy pressure on the brain center of the Australian team in the person of the trio Patty Mills - Joe Ingles - Matthew Dellavedova (not the last people in the NBA made a total of 11 losses for three and often simply did not understand how they made their way to the Spanish ring), exhausting him to the limit back in normal time.
Only Kei, whom the Red Fury probably underestimated, more or less managed to score at a second pace: 20 rebounds in the attack brought Australia only 16 points. For the second half, one of the most successful World Cup teams in the Celestial Empire scored only 34 points, completely bogged down in the opponent’s defenses.
And most importantly, after a long break, the Spaniards began to play the leader, the reigning NBA champion in the Toronto Raptors, Mark Gasol. I didn’t really remember anything in the first half (he scored only four of his final 33 points before the big break), in the third quarter the 34-year-old center, who already had a victory in the world championship in his track record, began to systematically disassemble his opponents for parts in every corner platforms.
Gasol managed to block shots, get from behind an arc no worse than a record sniper, earn one free kick after another and was simply not kept in someone else's "paint", no matter how Bogut, who is considered a high-class "big" defense plan, did not try to prevent him. Without the magnificent performance of Gasol Jr., the Spanish comeback would never have happened. The partners reached for the star, and even such a well-deserved basketball player as Rudy Fernandez chopped for each ball as if his life depends on the outcome of the reporting match.
The transformed Iberian basketball players, the Australian team lost, first of all, psychologically. Lemanis’s team frankly shook hands (30 misses from the three-point arc with 40 attempts testify to this best), and she failed to finish the game in her favor in the main time, when Mills missed the potential winning penalty a few seconds before the fourth a quarter, not in the first additional five-minute, when Dellavedova failed to execute any intelligible throw with a siren.
And in the second overtime, infinitely self-confident Sergio Yu buried the title ambitions of the Australians with two consecutive “bombs” and registered Spain's entry into the World Cup final. The second in its history and the first since 2006, when the "Red Fury" with the very young Gasol and Fernandez took the title in a cage.
New shock from Argentina
The Spaniards will have to fight for gold not with France, elevated by bookmakers to the status of the planet’s favorite after synchronous relegation of Serbs with the Americans in the quarterfinals, but with amazing Argentina, which caused sensations in matches to hit the endless stream.
Vincent Collet's team, like the Balkans a few days earlier, lost to the South American team in all respects and parameters: losing each of the four quarters of the confrontation and giving the opponent literally each of the significant statistical categories, starting with the implementation of free throws (52% against 85%) and ending with the number of assists (11 vs 15).
The hero of the second semifinal of the World Cup was the 39-year-old Luis Skola. Quietly playing out a club career in the Celestial Empire on the threshold of the fifth dozen, he stands for the national team at a level that allowed him to keep all of Europe at bay in the mid-2000s and, at a fairly mature age, gain a foothold in the NBA. Former basketball player Houston Rockets and Toronto Raptors helped the Argentines do what the US national team burned out in the quarterfinals of the planet’s championship - to turn off the monstrous French center Rudy Gobert from the game, reducing the influence of his defensive skills on the result to the level of statistical error.
Latin American coach Sergio Hernandez was not afraid to experiment with combinations of players (in the match for the guaranteed KM medal his rotation was wider than in the meeting of the first group round with Russia), he neutralized the star pair of forwards of the French national team Evan Fournier - Nicolas Batum, who sent only seven to the target throws from the game from 23. But all of this could not be enough if not for the benefit of Chipping on the alien half of the site. Louis recorded 28 points in his asset - more than a third of the total number of points of his team - and finally killed the intrigue in the middle of the fourth quarter, twice in a row from the perimeter. One of his three-pointer, which brought Argentina's handicap to unplayable "+15", flew right through the hands of Gober, who did not have time to leave his counterpart in time on time.
Latinos will certainly be considered obvious outsiders of the finals, but on Sunday Spain will probably have to torment themselves with the Argentine team - a real bunch of energy around Skola, led by talented conductors from different clubs of the Spanish championship led by Facundo Campazzo.
In the semifinals, the defender of Real Madrid remained in the shadow of the forward-superveteran (although he scored a very important ball from the psychological point of view with the siren to end the second quarter), but together with the former Zenit basketball player Nicholas Laprovittola pleased neutral basketball fans with a lot of innovative solutions and spectacular gears.
Without experiencing absolutely any pressure from outside, Argentina, which has long jumped above its head, continues to create, and this ease of attack, bordering on genius, should definitely create “Red Furies” very big problems.