Brazil, S. Africa advance with classification wins in men's wheelchair basketball
12/9/2008 17:31
Brazil and South Africa notched wins in the Paralympic men's wheelchair
basketball classification games for places 9-12 today at the National Indoor
Stadium.
The winners will compete for 9th and 10th place on Tuesday at the
National Indoor Stadium.
Brazilian centre Jose Marcos Silva and three of his
teammates combined for 59 of their team's 75-56 victory over Sweden, including
48 points in the paint, 20 second chance points and 20 points from Sweden's 17
turnovers.
"We don't feel tired to compete continuously. We are in Beijing
just to compete, and before the competitions we trained a lot, so we have
adapted to the pace of the game. Although yesterday evening we just competed
with China, this morning we are ready again," said Everaldo Lima, Brazilian
guard.
"We both did defence and offence well. Today we strengthened our
defence, and good offence is the result of this.
"We got the good positions
under the basket and had good defence, so we could get most of the
rebounds."
"We used to set our goal as getting into the top eight, but now,
since it's impossible, we will just try to get the best ranking we can," added
he.
Swedish forward Peter Kohlstrom tied Silva as the game's highest scorer
with 20 points, but no other Swedish player scored more than eight
points.
South Africa overpowered China 67-60, stealing the ball 15 times and
scoring 20 points from China's 20 turnovers.
S. African forward Richard
Nortje was the game's highest scorer with 22 points.
"We came into this game
a bit slow, but we put it together in the second half. We let them (China) have
the first half, and that's why they came out fighting the way they did. If we
had closed the game down in the first half, there would have been a lot less
pressure on us in the second half," said Nortje.
On the upcoming ninth-place
game against Brazil, Nortje said: "We gave the game to Japan (yesterday), so we
are looking to not make the same mistakes again."
"We want to finish as
strong as we can. Overall, this tournament is a much better achievement than any
previous South African team has done before. All in all, it's been a good
tournament."
Chinese centre Ding Hai scored 20 points, but the Chinese team
missed four of their last five shots in the fourth quarter to prevent a closer
finish.
Sweden and China will compete for 11th and 12th place on
Sunday.
Xinhua
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