Women’s team ends up 11th at the Worlds
The women’s national basketball team finished 11th at the World Basketball Championship in its first ever appearance in the tournaments finals. Disappointed by their narrow loss to Belarus two days earlier, the players of coach Costas Missas lost to Japan on Friday 63-59 and faced Canada on Saturday morning for the 11th spot. The Greeks scored their third win in the tournament with an emphatic 71-55, bringing a positive end to their campaign which has put the country firmly into the top echelon of global basketball as far as the women’s game is concerned. «Our qualification to the world’s Top 12 and eventually the clinching of 11th place are historic, because I honestly do not know whether the national team will ever contest a world championship again,» said the team’s top scorer, Evina Maltsi. «As a nation, we tend to get easily disappointed as we were so sorry not to reach the quarterfinals that we could not control our mood in the game against Japan, so we lost to what is, in my opinion, a team that is inferior to us,» Maltsi added.
