| The Israeli coach of Dynamo lost to his compatriots again The coach of the men's basketball team of the capital's Dynamo, Israeli Zvi Sherf, is leaving for his homeland in a bad mood. Before the return match of the FIBA Euroleague quarterfinal series with Hapoel Tel Aviv, the blue and white have only a slim chance of overall victory. In the home match, the Muscovites hopelessly lost to their opponents - 82:92. And it’s not even a ten-point difference. Dynamo played one of the worst matches of the season on their site, completely failing in the middle of the match.
Three minutes after the starting throw-in, neither team could open the scoring. Soon the hosts were already ahead - 9:2. However, in the future, only disappointment awaited fans of the famous club. The Israelis completely dominated the game, quickly corrected the mistakes they made in the opening and took the lead. In the middle of the third quarter, the defeat of Dynamo, who played sadly, became obvious - Hapoel pulled away by 19 points. The team from Tel Aviv plays its home matches in a cramped hall with excellent acoustics. The local torsida is not shy about a wide variety of noise effects, and they will certainly have a negative effect on the opponent.
The only thing that could please Zvi Sherf and Dynamo President Yevgeny Gomelsky was a meeting with a good old friend. Hapoel general manager Ranu Kahanu assisted Scherf, who was then working in Israel, for several years, and in the early 90s, together with Gomel Jr., he led the Israeli student teams at the World Universiade. Kahanu led the men's team, and Gomelsky led the women's team. As for the match itself, all Scherf’s efforts to establish a collective and organized game remained in vain. The Israeli regularly took time-outs, made numerous substitutions, and changed the shape of his defensive formations. No use! The theatrical gestures of the coach, his cheerful runs and throws along the sideline, the incomparable facial expressions, which did credit to a good actor, only slightly enlivened the dreary attempts of the foreign legionnaires of the “blue and white” to oppose the guests with something serious.
Desperate, Scherf gave an unusually large amount of time to his not-so-loved Serbian defender Branko Milisavljevic. For long-time Dynamo fans, he reminds him of the now missing Dmitry Metelkin, who played for the team in the early 90s, when all the best players left Russia in search of happiness abroad. These basketball players have a similar style of play - they took the ball to someone else's half of the court and, at the first opportunity, immediately threw it around the hoop. Metelkin, with a ridiculous percentage of hits, managed to score 30-40 points per match; Milisavljevic is prevented from winning his laurels by competition in the lineup. This time the Serb shot decently and scored 16 points. Only Americans Jimmy Oliver (19) and Dmitry Domani (18) have more.
Hapoel coaches really used only seven players, among whom US forward Michael Wright and 2003 European champion Lithuanian Virginijus Prashkevicius stood out. By the way, at the first stage in Group D, Dynamo were already defeated by representatives of Israel. Scherf's team lost again on the floor of the Dynamo Sports Palace to Hapoel from Nahariya - 91:94.
In another quarterfinal pair, Kazan UNICS on the banks of the Volga calmly recorded superiority in class over the Serbian "Gemofarm" - 76:52, allowing the guests to seal the ring only in the fifth minute of the meeting. The return matches will take place on March 5. If the winners of the best-of-three series are not determined on Friday, the decisive matches will be held on March 10 again in Russia.
The voting results of more than 150 thousand fans who used the Internet to determine the team compositions for the Euroleague all-star match on March 16 in Kyiv have been summed up. Among the basketball players of Russian clubs, the capital's Dynamo players Domani and the Greek Nikas Ikonomou, Sergei Chikalkin (Ural Great), Lithuanians Saulius Shtombergas and Eurelius Zukauskas (both UNICS) will play for the Old World team. Kazan coach Stanislav Eremin was appointed head coach. The “rest of the world” team included American Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (Ural Great) and Australian Chris Anstey (UNICS). There was no worthy coach from another continent in the Euroleague clubs, so Zvi Sherf will head the team. Ilya TRISVIATSKY |
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