"In the competition, half of our team was made up of the U16 national team. Others were not 18 years old either. That's why we didn't have enough energy."
Evren Alkaya, head coach of Azerbaijan's U18 national basketball team, told Idman.biz.
The Turkish specialist explained the reasons why the team that won the silver medal of Division C in the European Championship lost to the host Kosova in the final with a score of 65:75. He said that this is a newly created team: "We have 16-17 basketball players who can play in international competitions. We build 2 teams from 1 team. For this reason, we did not have enough strength. The shots of the opposing team were more successful than ours. Except for one person, all of them were basketball players born in 2006. The player’s age disparity played role. This is very impressive in such encounters. In fact, we played well in the final. We were effective in the attack. But we had deficiencies in defense. The opponent was well prepared. They also used the advantage of playing on their home ground and the support of the fans. There were about 1000 people. This created excitement among our players. But we also missed many episodes."
Alkaya said that she was satisfied with the performance of the girls in the games: "I appreciate the performance of the team. Next season, our national team can play in this category. But still, many of our players will be young. In fact, we should not have participated in this tournament this year. We came to gain experience. We did not expect to advance to the final. Winning a medal was a surprise for us."
The head coach does not consider the defeat in the final a failure: "Such competitions are an assessment in countries where basketball has just begun to develop. Everyone looks at their team from the outside and tries to correct the shortcomings. This is our 2nd year. We won 2 gold and 1 silver medals in 2 years. It would be unfair to rate this as a failure. If the results achieved by us are achieved in countries that have been playing basketball for 20 years, they will consider it as a success. We lost in the final by 10 points. Normally, this difference should have been 5-6 points."
Azerbaijan won in each of the 4 matches it played before the final.
Emin Aga
Idman.biz
