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2012 EuroCup Women Final
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Kayseri Kaskispor continued their play-off tradition of winning the first leg in the EuroCup Women competition by cruising past number one seeds Dynamo Kursk (69-55) in front of a competition record crowd of 7200 in the Kadir Has Arena.
Both teams have modified their rosters since the start of the season, so that their games during the group phase have no reference to the final.
In the first game American players from both teams dominated the scoring.
Kayseri Kaskispor were led by a double-double performance by Latoya Sanders, who scored 19 points and picked up 13 rebounds. Nakia Sanford, Anna De Forge and Donneka Hodges (Lewis) added 15, 13 and 11 points receptively. In addition Bahar Ozturk, also known as Barbara Turner, added 9 points.
Dynamo Kursk were saved from being blown away by Temeka Johnson who scored 20 points. The only other player in double digits was Lithuanian international Ausra Bimbaite with 12 points.
The hosts took the lead (6-4) two minutes into the game and never lost it for the rest of the way.
The five top scorers all played 34 minutes of more in the game. However the Turkish fans were able to enjoy a steal from Turkish youth international Pinar Demirok for the last score of the first half. She was the only Turkish born player to play for the hosts in this game with nine minutes on the court.
Kayseri Kaskispor's head coach strong>Ayhan Avci explained at the end of the game to FIBA Europe: "First of all I'm happy to win this game against a team that was undefeated until this day. For the point difference, I don't want to say something because it could be more than 14 but we didn't use the last possessions well. We won the first half of this game but we have the second in Kursk. I congratulate Kursk because they are a really good team. After this Kayseri will be in a really good position in Europe with these fans and with this awesome gym. I would like to thank all of our fans, there were 10.000 people in here."
Alfredas Vainauskas did not analyse the game but said his team lost because: "We had a very hard schedule in the last 14 days. We had Russian league games, Russian cup games and the Eurocup final game. So we are tired and our condition is bad. But we have the second game in Kursk."
Kayseri Kaskispor semi-final qualification
Dynamo Kursk storm into the final
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EuroCup Women picture credit
ajansspo.com
Date created: 19 March 2012
