Sport.ru | Triumph of Spartak

25.02.2010 Following getting into the Finals of Four of the Russia Cup Spartak from the Northern Capital won a most important victory in a game of a regular Super League A championship, thus its chances for play-off  stopped being “theoretical” and became “quite realistic”...

 Russia cannot be understood with just the mind... Yesterday Spartak needed the victory more than ever; the game was eventually scheduled at the time convenient for spectators, just before the team won a most important victory in a very difficult game... Still the Jubilee Sports Palace was unpleasantly empty – the Saturday cup anti-record fell... Well, those who did come, never regretted it!
The home team showed to their opponent right from the start that the victory is vital to them. It’s been a long time since the red-whites were so charged for fighting right from the first seconds of the match! Little wonder that after just minutes Spartak lead the score, 8:2. However, later, as it often happens with Spartak players this season, forwards’ play lost coordination. During the next six minutes of game time they, put together, gained only 5 points, and at the same time one of their opponents, Brion Rush, started his solo, which lasted the whole game. 12 points scored by a tiny (by basketball standards, of course) American in the first quarter and only a minimum advantage of Spartak by the results of the ten-minute period –  24:23.
Rush spent most part of the second quarter on the bench, and Vadim Panin, the captain of the Moscow region team, picked up his function of scoring points, and with great success: during this period of the game he gained 7 points. Evgeniy Kolesnikov scored 7 points and James White score 6 points during the quarter for the home team.  It was mainly thanks to their efforts that Spartak was leading the score, and the teams left for the big break with the three-point difference in favor of the red-whites. All the fighting was still ahead.
The beginning of the second half of the game was simply awful for Triumph players. Even though the third quarter started poorly for their opponents: Egor Mescheryakov missed the basket twice from the penalty shot line.  Still, the red-whites were stronger in the pick-up and Mescheryakov partially rehabilitated himself in the eyes of his partners by sending the ball directly into the basket. That was the beginning! The first five minutes of the quarter ended with the score 17:4 in favor of the home team.  The result was 61:45, and it seemed that Triumph was in deep knock out.
No way!  Like in the first ten-minute period, the home team suddenly forgot about the opponents’ basket for a long time and scored only four points during the second half of the third quarter. At the same time Triumph suddenly started scoring! Panin, Rush and Pavel Sergeev (twice) made perfect three-point hits, and nearly lethal “minus 16” turned into quite perspective “minus 5”; the score was 65:60 before the start of the final quarter.
Still, Spartak needed the victory more that evening. All players of the red-white team forgot their personal statistics and made a 100% contribution into achieving their goal. Even the constantly criticized Levans Fields, as it appears, forgot his ambitions and played team basketball. Nonetheless, remembering Fields’ unsuccessful performance in the end during previous games, Zvi Sherf, the head coach of the home team, preferred to spend the last minutes without him and sent playmaker White to the playfield. Speaking of the guests, it seemed that only some players worried about the result of the game. Panin, Sergeyev and Rush – these are the only ones who were not indifferent in the Moscow region team.  
To a great deal thanks to Rush’s mastery the intrigued remained till the last seconds of the game.  Brion’s 11 points in the final quarter (including three perfect 3-point hits)  compensated complete failure of the Moscow region “big” players (Bashminov, Miller, Nesterov and Varlamov jointly scored as many as 10 points, while their opponents Rackovich, Mescheryakov and Dedushkin - 28).
Anyway, the fate of the game was determined in the end – 78:76 in favor of Spartacus but Triumph had 10.7 seconds for the final attack. The hero of the game, Rush, got the ball, he makes a fake... And referees see traveling! After the game there wee different opinions on the issue whether there was traveling or not, and the head coach of the guest team Stanislav Eremin preferred not to answer the question of out correspondent.  

Eremin said the following at the post-game press conference : “Today, as we expected, the game was difficult. We let the Spartak players go too far in the third ten-minute period.  The moment when Spartak gained a big score difference, probably became the point of no return, the moment, which did not allow us to win.  We allowed annoying slips at that time and a number of fast breakthroughs, and further it was too difficult to correct the difference.   
It is already the third or the fourth time when we lose in the end. I cannot say that we make some principal mistakes but the fact is that even though we keep fighting we still lose. Obviously this is the membership of our team for today that is responsible for the number of mistakes in simple situations but occasionally we bring up performance, which we are not ashamed of.
My congratulations to Spartak on their victory. I think it is very important to them”.   

Zvi Sherf, the head coach of the red-whites, was very happy with the victory but he was not very talkative that evening either: “We won the second game in a row; more so, this time we won in the championship. Today we played better than in the previous game but I’m disappointed with the fact that we failed to keep the 10-15 point difference. Of course, we played 4 games during the last 2 weeks and we were tired, besides, we had only 3 days to get ready for the game. Still we kept saying that we should not allow the Triumph players three-point dashes, some of them could not be stopped but in some cases they could be avoided, this is the issue of defense.  We played too differently throughout the game. In the fourth quarter we play not so well as in the first three quarters, and this is, to a great deal, connected with lack of confidence of some players during the fourth quarter. We will discuss the matter with them.
We are a team, which should not allow our opponent to score too much. Today we allowed the opponent to score 41 points in the first half of the game, this is too much, and this figure is explained, among other factors, by a great number of the opponents’ three-point moves.  At the same time we scored 80 points, which is even more than in the previous games.  
Currently the team will have two days off: it needs rest after such intensive schedule of games and training sessions. Starting from Saturday we will begin getting ready for the game with Dynamo.  We intend to win the game and go up from the last position in the tournament table”.

 It was only the author of this interview who put questions to the Spartak head coach that evening:

-Tsvi, are you disappointed with White’s performance as playmaker?
- I think he could do better. But we have no other option. In any case we need a replacement for Levans.  Kolesnikov showed that he is much more useful in the position of attacking defender than in the position of a playmaker.  I believe that White will play number one much better by the key games in the end of the season.  Probably we put too much pressure upon James but, in my opinion, there is no other player in our team who could be the second playmaker.    
- Do you see Alexey Zozulin as playmaker?
- No, Alexey plays either number three or number four”.

 Andrey Galenko