Tau did not make a revenge

CSKA won its 23rd game in a row and 10th in the Euroleague. The final score of the game in Vitoria vs. Tau is 81-85. Three players achieved 16 points each. They are J.R.Holden, Marcus Brown and Martin Muursepp. Theodoros Papaloukas added 10. Aleksey Savrasenko gathered game high 10 rebounds. On the other side Arvidas Macijauskas scored 17, Luis Scola and Kornel David – 15 each, Robert Conley – 13.

TAU Ceramica vs CSKA: 81-85

The Army club started the game in a very optimistic way. Zone defence and points of all the CSKA starting five players made the difference between to teams double digits on the 5th minute of the game – 17-7. But Tau pulled itself together and made its own run that set the final score of the quarter – 23-26.

The second quarter passed almost in the same way. CSKA made 10-2 run, Tau answered with 13-5. But both of the teams started to get nervous as the only thing that was missing was stability in any point of the game.

The start of the last quarter brought bad news for CSKA. The team was scoreless for 5 minutes and the rival was in the mood to win the game – 71-63. But at last the Moscovites pulled their selves together and started to built the platform to fight for the win in the last minutes. They succeeded. Robert Conley 3-pointer with 41 seconds to go made the guests nervous and set the score on the 81-83 mark. In the next possession Dimos Dikoudis missed a very hard shot, but a bit later Tau’s Arvidas Macijauskas on the other side of the court missed the decisive shot. Theodoros Papaloukas made the golden rebound and his free throws set the final score of the game 81-85.

The head coach Dusan Ivkovic:

- I think that it was a high-level game for 40 minutes. We played great three quarters, but we lost some concentration, something that I consider logical, after a hot start of Tau in the beginning of the fourth quarter. I think my team deserved absolutely this victory. I respect Tau and Vitoria so much, so do I with my friend Ivanovic, because of this town did for basketball. I think that although this win was no so important for us we showed discipline on court, we showed that we can turn the game when it became irregular. It's normal that the game gets hot between two teams that met so many times in the past, so I want to congratulate my players for turning the game in these hard conditions.

The head coach of Tau Ceramica Dusko Ivanovic:

- We already knew that every team would be able to get ahead with 10 or more points but we were sure that the end would be a very close one. We showed, like we already showed in the last games, that we don't have enough patience to play the last minutes, the opposite showed CSKA, who knew pretty well to find good shots in the end. It's a pity that we lost 2 or 3 balls when we got a good margin in the last quarter. We didn't defend well in the last minutes, we let Marcus Brown draw fouls to get easy points from the free-throw line. We still depend on ourselves to qualify. If we manage to add three more wins, we'll be in the Top 16.