By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
French national team coach Vincent Collet admitted that his team performed poorly against Australia, while mentioning that it is useless to look for excuses after such a defeat.
“We were clearly dominated in terms of aggressiveness”, he said. “We had seen that happening also against Argentina. We were overwhelmed by their ‘backdoor’ passes, their individual game and our lack of defensive cohesion, when the help did not arrive. We must put more pressure on the ball in defense. We let the Australian players make passes and lobs that even I could do in practice”
“We didn’t perform as well as we can on offense, especially when it comes to the assists. We had 20 when our game usually produces around 20. If we want to keep the hope of having a good tournament we must win against China and find that missing cohesion in our game. Maybe the long period of inactivity after the qualifying tournament partially explains our defeat. But it is useless to look for excuses. It won’t help us. And Australia had a great game.”
Mickael Gelabale added: “We knew that this would be a difficult start, facing opponents that play physically. We had equal aggressiveness only for five minutes. Other than that, we let them walk on us. We must raise our head and look at our goal. We will respond by being aggressive. We should have listened what the coached asked, run the court and play better as a whole.”
“It’s almost unacceptable”, said Nicolas Batum to French RMC radio. “We haven’t been playing well in our last games. The Australians were harder than us, we were quite surprised with our start to the match. But there’s still a long road ahead of us. We should not panic and we will qualify.”