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A strong third quarter performance by the Great Britain women’s basketball team helped them complete a 50-45 win over reigning Paralympic champions Germany in the Rio Olympic Arena.
Germany’s defence put plenty of pressure on the Great Britain team throughout the first quarter and were ahead by three points, 17-14, at the end of the opening quarter.
At all square, 24-24, at half time it was the third quarter that proved to be the deciding quarter as Great Britain winning it 12 – 4, taking a 36-28 lead into the final ten minutes and despite losing the final quarter they held on for historic victory.
Germany captain, Marina Mohen said, “We were never really into the game, we just scored 45 points that’s not enough to win a game at the Paralympics especially against a team like GB. We started well in offence but then we lost it and we never got back into the game. They shot much better today than they did against Canada, which we had expected and we knew that they would be much better than they were two days ago. They were ok but we were not, we never found our game and that was the biggest problem.
“We play Canada tomorrow, which is going to be a very important game, we have to start calculating to see by how many points we have to win but foremost we have to win first and just play much better than we did today.”
Great Britain co-captain, Helen Freeman said, “It was a good game from us, I’m particularly happy that we came through some situations where we were behind at the beginning. There were times we got ahead and then they pulled it back and we had enough to come out and get the win in the final seconds which was pretty important for us.
“We will still go into Brazil in the same manner as whether we won or whether we lost, our coach talks about building momentum and we’ve done the first step in building that.”
For full match statistics click here https://www.rio2016.com/en/paralympics/wheelchair-basketball-womens-group-a-preliminary-wb-11
