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Pachulia: We showed what our game should look like

Georgia were impressive yesterday, and confirmed why they're considered to be a big potential obstacle for any big team. They're coming to their second home match as the favorites again

FIBA Europe/ Khatia Jijeishvili

Just like we said, the Georgians showed yesterday why we think they could be one of the biggest possible surprises at the upcoming Eurobasket. Igor Kokoškov's players played an amazing match against Estonia yesterday. Estonia never had a real chance, and lost by -35 in the end.

- Besides the few nervous minutes at the beginning, I think we showed what our game should look like at the Eurobasket. There's still a lot of work to do and we still have a lot of room for progress, but I'm very satisfied with what we're showing now - the best player Zaza Pachulia said after the match.

He ended the match with 16 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists, and lead the list of seven Georgians with double-digits. That only shows how much width this team have offensively. Manuchar Markoishvili described it even better:

- What you've seen is Georgia, and without Tornike Shengelia. With him back, we'll become even more powerful and then we'll be ready for the real stuff. Realistically, Estonia are not a team we can measure our real strength on, and it's good that it's like that.

What CSKA scorer wanted to say is that his team are ready for much bigger things, something any neutral observer could have easily concluded. Their match against Latvia today is a bit tougher of a task, but the Georgians are, again, a big favorite before the match.

Just like yesterday, Georgia should dominate the paint, and Latvia can hardly respond to the rebound power of Pachulia, Sanikidze and Shermadini. Add to all that what Pullen, Tsintsadze and Markoishvili showed yesterday, and it's obvious that Georgia can go only for a win in their second match at home.

Latvia started the Tbilisi tournament by losing convincingly to Italy. You could see in the first 20 minutes that the Baltic team had defensive problems. The Italians scored 52 points by the half-time, and were in the lead by 18. The Latvians started playing better defensively after that, and scored 30 points in the following 20 minutes, but that didn't help them become any kind of a threat. The Italians were leading by 25 by the beginning of the last period.

Latvia had 19 turnovers, 10 more than the opponent. That allowed the Italians to score 17 easy points. The Latvian shots from the court stayed under 39%, they had 7/23 three-pointers, only 3 rebounds, compared to 10 by the Italians. Blums was the only one with the double-digits offensively, 13 points. Berzinš scored 2/8, Janičenoks 3/7. Bertans only had 6 points. It was like the Latvians got scared by the Italian NBA stars. The three Belinelli-Bargnani-Gallinari scored 50 points total.

- We had 15 turnovers in 20 minutes, and that's far too many. We made so many mistakes in the first half-time and made so many wrong offensive decisions. The Italians used that skilfully. We struggled in the defense especially, in one-on-one situations... The quality of our game improved in the second half-time, but we just couldn't decrease their advantage - the coach Ainars Bagatskis said, and added:

- Three weeks before the start of the Eurobasket, I didn't expect us to be awesome offensively. The fatigue that accumulated during the tough practices shows. I believe we'll improve with each game, and show more consistency in our game. We'll try to get some lessons from yesterday to use against Georgia, and play better.