ALGIERS (Algeria) - Algeria's hope of securing the only ticket on offer for Africa Zone 1 teams for the 2023 FIBA AfroCan was dealt with a major blow after they came up short against visitors Tunisia on Friday in Algiers.

Yacine Toumi came up with man-of-the-match performance, leading Tunisia in the low-scoring 49-42 win in the first of two games against Algeria.

Toumi finished with nine points while four other Tunisians - Oussama Marnaoui, Firas Lahiani, Yanis Pejoux and Ahmed Addami - contributed seven points apiece. Lahiani added a game-high of 13 points to his account.

Algeria opened the score with a 5-0 run, but it was a short-lived lead as Tunisia regained control and went on to lead by as many as 10 points (48-38) in the fourth quarter.

Tunisia headed to the locker room with a 26-21 lead.

The game was so evenly-matched that until the last five minutes of the game it was impossible to predict a winner.

Despite the six lead changes, Tunisia turned out more efficient and determined to take the important lead in this two-game series.

"Tunisia out-rebounded us, especially in the last four minutes of the game," Algeria coach Ahmed Bendjabou admitted in a chat with FIBA.basketball.

Algeria made only 4 of their 28 three-point attempts and to make matters worse, they finished 4 for 10 from the Free-Throw line. 

Both Marahi Ramzi and Abdelhaki Hanna lead Algeria in scoring with seven points each, but they will need to come up with a more sophisticated game-plan to overcome Tunisia in Game 2 on Sunday.  

"We haven't played warm-up games since February and we struggled to execute our offensive game-plan, especially in three-point shooting," Bendjabou explained before admitting that his team was "poor from the free-throw line."

"Defensively we were good, but our attack didn't work. The score shows how good our defense was" Bendjabou pointed out.

The two teams resume their FIBA AfroCan qualifiers on Sunday, June 25 in Algiers for the second and last game of the series.

The winner of Africa Zone 1 qualifiers will be added to Group C of the 2023 AfroCan alongside Morocco and Rwanda who won Zone 5's qualifiers on Friday.

TO WATCH GAME 2 BETWEEN ALGERIA AND TUNISIA, CLICK HERE.

FIBA