Ireland play Spain in last 16 of FIBA U20 Women's European Championship

Ireland will meet second ranked Spain in the Round of 16 at the FIBA U20 Women’s European Championship in Hungary tomorrow.

Despite suffering defeats to Portugal (68-47), Serbia (81-76) and Latvia (85-45) in the group phase, Ireland have shown they deserve to compete at the top table of European basketball with some gritty displays. Their five-point loss to Serbia in particular, where Ireland closed the gap on their opponents all the way to the buzzer, emphasised all the skill and battling traits within this Irish team.

WIT Waterford Wildcats’ Sarah Hickey and Ella O’Donnell of Trinity Meteors lead the performance charts, averaging 12.7 and 10-points respectively. Hickey’s dazzling 20-point display against the Serbs, is sure to go down as one of the best individual performances in the competition. NUIG Mystics’ Hazel Finn isn’t far behind her compatriots, with 9.3 points-per-game and a helpful 5 rebounds and 3.3 assists on the stat sheet.

Ireland in possession against Latvia at the FIBA U20 Women's European Championships. 

Next up for head coach Karl Kilbride’s team is a meeting with eight-time champions, Spain. The Spanish most recently took gold at this venue in Sopron, Hungary in 2018. They are unbeaten in group phase play, securing wins against Lithuania (80-40), Bulgaria (98-27) and Poland (77-67). Players to look out for include Laia Lamana, who is averaging 11-points, Elena Buenavida and Noa Maria Djiu, who is contributing over 9-points and 6 rebounds per game to date.

You can watch the game here.

On tomorrow’s fixture, coach Kilbride said:

I don't think we could be anymore excited. They're the No.2 ranked team in the world and we get a chance to play against them. There's not many teams or people involved in Basketball Ireland who have gotten the chance to do that.

We are leardning lessons by the quarter here. For 38-minutes against Serbia we were maginificent. That's against a team who are trying to win this tournament. We keep saying that we aren't here to make up the numbers. We are one of sixteen teams here competing in the 'A' Division trying to win games and stay here as long as possible.

We are absolutely good enough to be here. We just need to learn lessons from the three group games and apply them. I am sure we will learn more lesson tomorrow, but that is what it is all about. Our outcome goals maybe aren't as important as our process goals at the moment. 

We probably came in too mentally casual against Latvia, thinking we could just turn the switch on and we saw that at his level, that is not possible. We are now focused on making sure tomorrow we execute the things we want to do and leave ourselves in the best position possible to pick up a win.

I really believe that we have the talent in this group to stay up and that is the aim now over the next four games, starting with the most exciting game tomorrow evening. 

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Results:

Ireland v Portugal – 47-68 - Watch here.

Ireland v Serbia – 76-81-  Watch here.

Ireland v Latvia – 45-85 - Watch here.

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Round of 16:

Ireland v Spain -  Novomatic Arena Sopron, Hungary – Tuesday, July 12^th, 19:15.

Watch Ireland v Spain.