Basketball
The opponent openly succumbed to Ukraine at the European Championship. A mockery of fair sport!
The Croats specifically gave the Ukrainians the ending of the game, but not for political reasons.
The European Basketball Championship, already at the start marked by scandals in the matches of Georgia with Turkey and Lithuania with Germany, is in danger of turning into a real farce. Now a very strange episode occurred before the final whistle in the game of the Croatian national team against the Ukrainian team.
At the end of their last duel in the group stage, the Croats, with a score of 90:83 in their favor, unexpectedly … stopped playing. The team literally stopped resisting the opponents and even allowed them to score!
However, politics has nothing to do with it.
The giveaway game
The match between the Croatian and Ukrainian national teams until the very end looked like an ordinary but stubborn match in the spirit of a big tournament. However, with the score 90:83 in favor of the “checkers”, the defender of the Balkans, Bojan Bogdanovich, threw the ball into the ring of the Ukrainians with a foul and then, apparently, deliberately missed a free kick, having received some instructions from his coaches along the way.
After that, the Croats, 19 seconds before the end of the match, decided to quit the game altogether, giving the opponent absolute freedom. The players of the Ukrainian national team, in turn, began to discuss with their head coach whether they needed to carry out a productive attack, but in the end they nevertheless carried out a combination and threw the ball into the basket, reducing the gap to five points.
As a result, the game ended with a score of 90:85, but the most interesting thing is just beginning at this point. After the end of the game, journalists and spectators broke their heads, trying to figure out what the Croats wanted to achieve in general, allowing the Ukrainians to close the gap by a couple of points. The fact is that from a tournament point of view, such a decision looked, to put it mildly, not obvious …
Shortly after the match, Croatian national team player Ivan Ramlak answered in the affirmative to the question that in this way his team tried to avoid meeting the Serbian team in the ⅛ finals. But by doing so, the basketball player confused the situation even more:
Of course, there were such conversations between us. Nevertheless, we will be able to talk about who is waiting for us in the 1/8 finals only when all the matches of the group stage are completed, right? Ramlak said.
Made a mistake in the calculations?
The fact is that the “checkers” could avoid hitting the Serbs only if they took 2nd place at the end of the group stage. In this case, the team would have to meet with opponents who took 3rd place in Group D, and the Serbian team could not fall on him even if they were defeated by the Polish team in a face-to-face meeting.
But the concession to the Ukrainian team could not help the Croatian team to take 2nd place – at least in the event of the victory of the Italians over the British team. After that, three teams at once (Italy, Ukraine, Croatia) would score 8 points each and would be ranked according to the results of personal meetings and the difference in points scored in them. In Italy, it was the worst in any case (-6) – so in the event of a victory over the British, the team was guaranteed to take 4th place in the group, Ukraine with a difference of +6 went to 2nd, and Croatia (0) – to 3- e.
If the Croats had not given the Ukrainians the final segment, but, on the contrary, turned on even more, they could have overtaken the opponent in terms of points difference and gain a foothold in the coveted 2nd line. In other words, the Balkans ultimately simply confused the audience, because if the Italian team won in the first stage of the playoffs, they could come across both Serbs and Finns or Poles – the team did not receive certainty as a result of their machinations.
However, the Croats were still lucky: Serbia defeated Poland (96:69), and Italy defeated Great Britain (90:56). Thus, the 2nd place in group D went to the relatively harmless Finns, on which the Croats left the final 3rd line.
Europe championship. Men
Croatia – Ukraine – 90:85 (21:21, 24:21, 22:25, 23:18)
Source: Sportbox
I am a sports journalist who has been writing for a news website since 2015. My work primarily focuses on sports news, but I have also written about other topics such as technology and the arts. I have an extensive background in journalism, having worked as a reporter for a local newspaper before moving to a news website.