Taiwan Beer pulled off mission impossible by rallying from as many as 19 down in the second half with an unbelievable fourth quarter to stun top-seeded Pure Youth Construction 77-73 in Game 4 of the Championship Finals at the Sinjhuang Sports Complex in New Taipei City last night.
The victory gives Taiwan Beer a commanding 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series.
Shang Wei-fan’s acrobatic two on a perfectly run fastbreak with 36 seconds remaining in the game gave the Brew Crew their first lead of the second half at 74-73 as they held off a last-second comeback attempt by the Builders to escape with an improbable win.
“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come and what we are really made of,” an emotional Taiwan Beer skipper Yen Chia-hua said after the game.
His troops are one win shy of topping the heavily favored three-time defending champs.
Trailing Taiwan Beer by a 2-1 margin after Tuesday night’s Game 3 in New Taipei City, the Builders needed a big showing in last night’s contest to stay in the hunt for their fourth straight title.
That was exactly what Pure Youth did as they opened the match with 22 points in the first quarter behind an eight-point effort by Tsai Wen-cheng to take a 22-11 lead.
Tsai carried his momentum into the second quarter with six more, while fellow guard Chen Shih-chieh added eight more in a 23-point second to close out the first half with a seemingly comfortable 45-26 advantage.
The 19-point lead did not rattle the Brew Crew as they chipped away at the deficit with a solid third that saw them outscore the Builders 27-16 to pull within 10 at the start of the fourth.
That was the mental boost they needed as they kept fighting back against the Builders and the clock to pull within one with less than a minute to play before Shang’s clutch two put them ahead for good.
Speedy guard Chiang Yu-an showed no signs of his tender age by leading all scorers with 23 on the night, including seven in the decisive fourth, to lead the underdogs past their foes.
As for Pure Youth, failure to protect the ball in an eight-turnover fourth was the difference in the game as they squandered a big lead in a dismal fourth to close out the game with a whimper.
ANFIELD BLUES: Kylian Mbappe arrived at Anfield on a run of 21 goals in 17 games, but he managed just three attempts in the match, none of them hitting the target Kylian Mbappe has been nearly unstoppable this season, but he hit a roadblock in their UEFA Champions League match at Anfield on Tuesday. For the second year running, the Real Madrid forward had a night to forget at Merseyside as Liverpool won 1-0. Mbappe looked a shadow of the player who has been tearing defenses apart all season. “We were lacking that threat in the final third,” said Madrid coach Xabi Alonso, without naming Mbappe individually. The FIFA World Cup winner for France rarely looked capable of finding a breakthrough against a Liverpool team who have been so defensively fragile for much of the
For almost 30 minutes, Vitomir Maricic did not take a breath. Face down in a pool, surrounded by anxious onlookers, the Croatian freediver fought spasming pain to redefine what doctors thought was possible. When he finally surfaced, he had smashed the previous Guinness World Record for the longest breath-hold underwater by nearly five minutes. However, even with the help of pure oxygen before the attempt, it had pushed him to the limit. “Everything was difficult, just overwhelming,” Maricic, 40, told reporters, reflecting on the record-breaking day on June 14. “When I dive, I completely disconnect from everything, as if I’m not even there.
TIGHT GAME: The Detroit Pistons, the NBA’s second-best team, barely outlasted the Washington Wizards, who fell to an NBA-worst 1-10 with their ninth consecutive loss Cade Cunningham’s triple double, Daniss Jenkins’ three-pointer at the buzzer and Javonte Green’s overtime dunk lifted Detroit past Washington 137-135 on Monday, stretching the Pistons’ win streak to seven games. In an unexpected thriller, the NBA’s second-best team barely outlasted a Wizards club that fell to an NBA-worst 1-10 with their ninth consecutive loss. “We knew how big this game was for us,” Jenkins said. “We wasn’t going to let nothing stop us from getting this W.” Cunningham made 14-of-45 shots and 16-of-18 free throws for a career-high 46 points, and added 12 rebounds, 11 assists, five steals and two
With a hat-trick on Wednesday, Victor Osimhen moved atop the UEFA Champions League scoring table, with the Nigeria striker netting all three goals in Galatasaray’s 3-0 victory over Ajax in Amsterdam. Osimhen moved to six goals this season in Europe’s elite club competition, one more than Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland. The Istanbul club signed Osimhen to a permanent deal from SSC Napoli in the summer for a record transfer fee in the Turkish League reportedly worth US$86 million. The 26-year-old striker needed less than 20 minutes to complete his first hat-trick in the competition. He headed in the opener in the
RSS