Asian junior meet begins today

By Our Sports Reporter

NEW DELHI, DEC. 16. It is the biggest basketball event to be held in the country since the 1982 Asian Games, as officials of the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) proudly put it, and there seems to be no want of effort on any front by the host.

The NDMC Talkatora Indoor Stadium has been readied for the 15th Asian junior women's championship, with a media centre, cafeteria and a players lounge put up adjacent to the main structure. And not just the organisational skills, there have been enough efforts to prepare the team too.

An eight-week camp at Bangalore put the probables through the paces, after which the team of 12 led by A.K. Raja Lakshmi of Karnataka was chosen. The accent was on shooting and lay-ups, which are bound to play a big role in matches against teams which are high on scoring skills.

The Indian camp is confident of doing better than the ninth place finish in the last edition at Tokushima, Japan, two years back, but to expect it to better its best of a fourth finish at the sixth edition in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1980, would be expecting too much.

Defending champion China too will be seen on the first day of the week-long championship, locking horns with Japan in the last match of the day.

China and Korea are the traditional superpowers of the continent, and streets ahead of the rest. Korea was the strongest to begin with, but China has held sway on more occasions in the recent past. That the two countries have shared the previous 14 titles equally, shows the disparity between them and the rest.

India is placed in group `A' along with China, Japan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and DPR Korea, while last year's runner-up Chinese Taipei, Korea, Uzbekistan, Hong Kong and Thailand form group `B'.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Sport
Next     : Anand, Shirov set up title clash