Group F preview – Heavyweight battles forecast

RIGA (FIBA U19 World Championship) – Liepaja’s top six teams took the 200km or so bus ride to Latvia’s capital city on Sunday to discover an 11,000 seat arena that matches the level of play witnessed in Groups C and D.

Among these are the Championship’s most obvious title contenders, the USA and Lithuania, who will trade blows on Tuesday as the Americans – the only remaining unbeaten team – will look to avenge their pre-tournament defeat to Valanciunas and co.

The USA, who narrowly escaped a shock defeat to Serbia, seem to be moving up in gears in spite and should be feeling fresh thanks to the most evenly shared game time of any team. Point guard Joe Jackson and forward Jeremy Lamb look a deadly combination with Paul Hewitt likely to increasingly turn to them.

Lithuania have recovered well from what their head coach labelled “a cold shower” – an opening day defeat at the hands of the young Croatian side, led by the extremely talented trio of Boris Barac, Dario Saric and Tony Katic.

Serbia and Croatia, who like Lithuania lie 2 and 1, seem to rise to the challenge when facing to opposition. In Katic and Aleksandar Cvetkovic, these two teams possess two of the best point guards in this tournament However, as they showed against China and Korea respectively – Croatia were horrible in their loss to Korea – they can quickly go from looking like title contenders to very average.

Canada and Egypt, who both qualified thanks wins over China, will be playing catch-up in the Eighth Final round and will have to pull off something special to reach the knock-out stages. Star guard Kevin Pangos, the athletic Dyshawn Pierre and big man Sim Bhullar will lead the charge for Canada, but no one player is averaging anything like 20 points per game.

The Egyptians conquered those partial to underdogs thanks to their double overtime win and their gutsy performance against Serbia. Egypt’s star player Assem Ahmed is lies third in the scoring and second in the rebounding charts, and but for one point against the USA, would have double-doubled every game.

FIBA