Team Taiwan suffered its fourth straight defeat in the Jones Cup Basketball Tournament with an 88-67 loss against Egypt at the Taipei County Sinjhuang Gymnasium on Monday night.
A first half scoring drought allowed the Egyptians to string together a 25-0 run that sealed the win long before the final buzzer sounded.
The loss virtually eliminated the home team from the top-four finish needed to qualify for tomorrow’s semi-finals.
Down by as many as 30 points, Taiwan began a comeback with a ball-denying full-court press that led to several turnovers against the Egyptians. This helped reduce the deficit to 14 points midway through the fourth quarter.
But that was as close as Taiwan got with fatigue taking its toll over the final five minutes of the game that saw the home side taper off to lose by a big margin.
Leading the inconsistent Taiwanese attack were Yang Tseh-yi and Ou-yang Jin-hen whose 17 and 16 points were a big reason Taiwan managed to pour in 30 points during the third quarter to make the second half somewhat competitive.
Firing on all cylinders with an offense that featured 204cm Tarek El-Gannam and 210cm Mohamed Khorshed, Egypt placed three different players in double-digit scoring, spearheaded by Rami Gunady’s six three-pointers.
TONIGHT’S GAME
The final game for Team Taiwan in the round-robin first round is a meeting with the US. Letting it all hang out may just be the best approach for a home side with little to lose and an expected seventh-place finish in the eight-team competition.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier