GB handed difficult EuroBasket draw
BySportsbeat
Published 12/12/2018 at 18:15 GMT
Great Britain women's basketball coach Jose Maria Buceta backed his team to be at their best after they were handed a tough draw for the EuroBasket championships.
Eurosport
Image credit: Eurosport
They will face reigning European champions Spain in Group A along with Ukraine and co-hosts Latvia when the tournament gets underway in Riga and Belgrade next summer.
But Buceta made no excuses as he talked up the qualities of a Great Britain side that qualified emphatically in a group that included Greece, Israel and Portugal.
"We did a great job being able to qualify and now we have to be ambitious in the final phase of EuroBasket Women," he said.
"Our group is tough, as all the groups are. This is the 16-team EuroBasket, with no room for weak teams.”
GB were in the fourth pot of seeds for the draw in Belgrade, with Olympic silver-medallists Spain the top seeds in the group.
Next year's championships will be Great Britain women's third appearance at the EuroBasket, and their first since 2015.
They finished ninth overall in the 2013 tournament – their best result to-date – beating Serbia and Latvia on the way to the final group stage.
And Buceta knows that they will need to channel those performances from five years ago in France to succeed in 2019.
"We have to focus on ourselves and prepare well for each game, game-by-game, step-by-step, believing on what we have proven we can do," he said.
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