Orange PicturesWorthy de Jong
NOS Sport•vandaag, 13:48
The Dutch 3×3 basketball players, who won Olympic gold in Paris last summer, stranded in the quarter-finals of the World Tour tournament in Amsterdam.
Team Amsterdam, where gold medalists Worthy de Jong, Arvin Slagter and Jan Driessen form a team with Julian Jaring, won both group matches on Saturday. But in the quarter-finals on Sunday things immediately went wrong against the Belgian Riffa: 21-14.
Utrecht, where Olympic champion Dimeo van der Horst plays, also lost in the packed Amsterdam Gashouder in the quarter-finals. The Serbian Liman was too strong with 21-13.
This tournament was the first time since the Paris Games that the Dutch Olympic champions played in front of their own audience. The four of them did not play together, because the World Tour plays in different teams.
Orange PicturesDimeo van der Horst in action on behalf of Team Utrecht
Things did not go as planned for Amsterdam, number four in the world rankings. Careless loss of ball and missing long shots led to a five-point gap at 11-16.
De Jong misses
De Jong was unable to make his shots from distance and that actually brought the entire Amsterdam machine to a standstill. Riffa, on the other hand, did take an active shot and ended the match in style with two two-pointers in a row – shots with which De Jong made his team Olympic champions last summer.
Just before, Utrecht had already had to bow to Liman. The Utrecht team, which is fifteenth in the world rankings, yesterday achieved a sensational victory in the group stage against another team from Serbia: Ub, the captain of the global ranking. Serbian Lima is tenth, but turned out to be a size too big for Utrecht.
The tournament in Amsterdam was the eleventh international tournament in a series of sixteen, spread across the year and the world. The Finals tournament will take place in Hong Kong at the end of November.
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