Basketball in Africa

The Nigeria U19 national team earlier today defeated Lebanon in the race for the placement of 13-14 position of the FIBA U19 World Championship holding in Novi Sad, Serbia.

The Nigerian lad who finished at the rear of group-C had only Monday defeated Puerto Rico today beat Lebanon 82-65 points to finish 13th in the 16-team championship.

The Adeka Dauda and Masai Ujiri tutored lads showed that they are not ready to compromise in the game against the Asian by winning the first quarter 26-17 points, though the Lebanese tries to come back into the game in the second quarter which they won 22-20 but gave in to the more determined African champion in the third quarter with a 24-11 points win but relaxed their game in the last quarter thus allowing the Lebanese to win by 15-12 points which was not enough to upturn the table against the Nigerians.

Nigeria forward, Emmanuel Negedu led his teammates on the scorers chat with a double double of 27 points and 10 rebounds, centre Solomon Alabi also had a double double of 11 points and 10 rebounds while energetic small forward Ibrahim Yusuf contributed 11 points, 7 rebounds and one block.

Assistant coach, Ujiri gave the boys kudos for their performance against the back ground that the team had the worst of preparation before the championship which contributed immensely to the not too impressive showing during the group stage where they have to play their opening game against Canada less than twenty-four hours after arriving Novi sad.

The players and their officials according to information made available to our correspondent shortly after defeating Lebanon is due back in Nigeria on Thursday after spending 24 hours at the Airport in Istanbul, due to poor flight arrangement.

Africa second representative beat Puerto Rico 89-81 to finish 15th.

Other results games already decided today:
Nigeria-82-65 Lebanon
Mali 89-81 Puerto Rico
Lithuania 85-66 China
Canada 99-83 Korea
Turkey 59-56 Spain
Serbia 79-62 France

By http://nigeriasports.com