BENGALURU: When they lost to Saudi Arabia before defeating Palestine in the Group H of the FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers in Jeddah, the Indian men’s basketball team qualification for the top continental competition was no longer in their hands.
Only after Saudi Arabia’s win over Palestine in the last group game on Sunday, India’s passage to the 16-nation Asia Cup, scheduled for next year in Jakarta, was assured. In fact, Vishesh Bhriguvanshi & co were only able to catch that game from the third quarter onwards as they were on the flight back to India when the game started.
After their qualification was guaranteed, there was palpable excitement on the Indian team’s WhatsApp group with congratulatory messages floating around. Bhriguvanshi credited the team’s pre-tournament training sessions. “In the last two months, we had put in a lot of hard work in training. Now, it is great that we have qualified as that was our big goal. but we were expecting to do much better than this, and also wanted to win the first game (against Saudi Arabia), but it had been five months or so since we had played any sort of top competitive match so,” captain Bhriguvanshi told this daily.
The Basketball Federation of India President K Govindaraj was pleased with the team’s effort and announced a cash prize of Rs 10 lakh as well. They have also booked a slot for the FIBA World Cup 2023 Asian qualifiers which starts from November. However, a lot of things need to be improved if they are to compete against the best teams in Asia. Even though they qualified, India, who were the highest- ranked team in the group, were outplayed by Saudi Arabia 61-80 and only narrowly beat Palestine 79-77.
The biggest highlight, if any, was the performance of Amritpal Singh and Amjyot Singh, who scored 30 and 23 points each in the last match. If they are to come up with a good show in the Asia Cup, the big three — Amjyot, Amritpal and Bhriguvanshi — need to be on top of their game. With the championship more than ten months away, they have time to prepare for the competition under the watchful eyes of coach Veselin Matic.