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FIBA Wild Cards: It’s down to Eight

2009/12/11 7:42 am 000 1 comment

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Stuart Leung

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We are onlyy one day away from FIBA announcing the final four countries that will fill the tournament field for the 2010 World Championships.

(Predict the four teams to WC2010)

The Wild Card process started with 14 teams hoping for one of the four remaining spots; now it’s been whittled down to just eight basketball federations and their current FIBA world rankings: Cameroon (#43), Germany (7), Great Britain (73), Korea (27), Lebanon (24), Lithuania (6), Nigeria (22), and Russia (17).

From FIBA’s world rankings, the four wild cards should go to Lithuania (6), Germany (7), Russia (17) and Nigeria (22), but who knows what FIBA is thinking, but they consider three criteria when selecting wild cards; sporting, economics, and governing aspects for each country.

Wild-card hopefuls must also pay a controversial 500,000 € fee, prior to FIBA’s decision, with the fees going into the marketing and promotion of basketball through FIBA’s International Basketball Foundation.

A maximum of three teams from one region will be allowed, meaning that Europe can only have 3/4 teams that can be awarded the Wild Card, and it’s not unlikely that Europe will get three teams.

Stay tuned, there will be some very happy teams and some very unhappy teams come Saturday night.

1 Comment

Elias

2009/12/12
2:07 am

I think lebanon deserves a wild card, for many reasons:

1. They have participated in the last two world championships, which shows they have some good experience in this tournament, and they have greatly improved from one championship to another (winning 0 games in the first, but beating France and venezuela in 2006!!!)

2.Basket-ball is the most popular sport in lebanon, in every street you can find a basket-ball basket , and players too !!

3. Economically, lebanon is very close to turkey(they can get to turkey even by bus), and as everyone has noticed in multiple tournaments the lebanese attendance is always the biggest in asia!(for example in doha quatar in 2007, when lebanon played against quatar there was more lebanese than local people in the court. And of course, this would be a good attraction for turkey!

4. Lebanon showed that it actually has a great basket-ball team, with 2 ex-NBA players (Mathew Freije, and Jackson vroman), and many of the finest players in asia (Fady el khatib, rony Fahed, and many others…), and it had almost beaten China in their first game, and deserved winning the second, but the HUGE referee mistake !!!! costed lebanon it’s place in the final, (lebanon was up one point with ball possession, it ended up, down 2 because of the unfair foul !!) Even fiba asia admitted the mistake !

5. I can conclude that lebanon, can make big surprises, and give some taste for the next championship! It can beat Huge teams like china, and it already made it in 2006 beating france.

The mistake is human, so we have to accept it, but we can correct the situation now !
Let’s grant Lebanon a well deserved wild Card!

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