Asia’s basketball future on show

TEHRAN (The Perimeter View) - Iran are back home after a worthwhile experience at the Olympics.

Some of the key members are looking for greener pastures abroad – with captain Samad Nikkah already in training for French club Cholet. Hamed Ehadadi, is reportedly talking to NBA clubs – Memphis Grizzlies on top of that list.

But it’s not just that the Asian basketball fraternity expects from Iran now.

The term Iran has more connotations attached to it vis-à-vis the future of Asian basketball.

The 20th FIBA Asia U18 Championship for Junior Men at the breathtaking Azadi Stadium complex in the Iranian capital, thus is looked forward to with a lot more interest than the mere ‘Who won and who lost.’

In a manner of speaking it was this tournament that ushered Iran into the big stage of Asian basketball, with their title-triumph when the tournament as held in Bangalore four years ago, a couple of weeks after the Athens Olympics.

Now four years down the line when they host the championship, this time only a couple of days after the Beijing Games, it is not only Iran but the entire continent which will look forward to the tournament as the base to plan their future.

For it is not only the title that is at stake, but also a place in the FIBA World U19 Championship next year which will be contested for. The top three teams from Iran will book their ticket to the global tournament for junior men to be held in New Zealand next year.

Four teams that played in the last championships at Urumqi two years ago have made way for teams that have fared better than them in the qualifiers for this year’s tournament.

Kuwait, Yemen, Thailand and Singapore failed to qualify for the Tehran tournament, but those who have replaced them are certainly not new comers.

Six-time champions Philippines, who entered the semifinals of the tournament in all the first 12 tournaments, make a comeback into the fray after missing the Urumqi edition. So do Saudi Arabia, who last played in Bangalore.

Jordan last played in the 1996 edition at Johor Bahru and United Arab Emirates have come back into the tournament after a long gap. The Emirians last played in 1982, but with a club of from that nation – Al Wasl – clinching the bronze in the high-profile FIBA Asia Champions Cup in May, their performance will be watched with keen interest.

China will defend their title drawn in Group A along side Japan, India and Hong Kong for the preliminary round. Promising youngsters will display their wares in ample measure in order to make headway into the Chinese scheme of things for the future, especially after China entered the quarterfinals of the Beijing Olympics.

Korea head Group B to play against Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Jordan. Kazakhstan is another team that has benefitted immensely from this tournament in the past. Players like Anton Ponomarev and Rustam Yargaliyev cut their teeth in this tournament before going on to become key players for their Senior National Team, which entered the semifinals at the FIBA Asia Championship at Tokushima last year.

Group C might as well be termed the Group of Death at Tehran. With two semifinalists of the Urumqi championship – Chinese Taipei and Lebanon – drawn together along side Philippines and UAE, this Group is expected to throw some interesting results.

The mention of Kyrgyzstan – the absence of the former Soviet Union republic due to the plane crash which snuffed the lives of more than 10 young sportsmen – bring an amount of poignancy when discussing the Group D preliminary groupings. Hosts Iran are thus left to handle only Malaysia and fellow West Asian contenders Syria.

Coming back to the significance of the tournament itself, Asian basketball is at such a stage when it needs a couple of factors to come together and fall at the appropriate places in the jigsaw.

All that it needs right now is for the youngsters of this zone to prove that the hopes raised and promises shown in the recent past are not mere flashes in the pan.

The performance of these youngsters, in fact, will be the most crucial and catalystic of all the factors that I mentioned.

Will that happen? I am as anxious and optimistic as each one of you.

So long…

S Mageshwaran