D’Agosto’s continental title and the reality of Angolan women’s basketball

SHEFFIELD (Julio Chitunda's African Message) - Angolan champions Primeiro D'Agosto won this year's FIBA Africa Champions Cup for Women (ACCW) on Sunday in the nation's capital city of Luanda, but there is a lot of work to be done in the country’s women’s basketball.

Jaime Covilha's team were not only the better team in the championship but also consistently superb throughout the tournament and deserved a round of applause for winning the title after upsetting InterClube de Luanda 69-53 in the final.

As well as finishing undefeated in eight games, D’Agosto also denied Africa’s most successful team, local and continental rivals InterClube, who chased their fifth ACCW title in six years.

I have always said that if any team other than an Angolan side had won this year's ACCW - and there were a number of potential candidates to do so - then questions would be raised about Angola's basketball dominance in the continent.

Remember, Angola are 18th in the FIBA Women's World Ranking and remain number one in Africa.

However, without being too negative, Angola women's basketball doesn't seem to be living its glory days. Just think how poorly tournament hosts Maculusso performed at the ACCW and how much of an impact foreign players had in D’Agosto success.

Maculusso lost all seven of their games and finished last in the 12-team tournament. In contrast, wealthy D'Agosto were a perfect 8-0.

Mozambican Leia Dongue and Maimouna Diarra of Senegal played major roles in D'Agosto's championship run. In Sunday's title game, the pair carried the Angolan champions to their first ACCW title since 2006.

While the Mozambican ace finished with 28 points and 18 rebounds and Diarra added a dozen to go with 7 boards, Angolan internationals Nacissela Mauricio, Isabel Francisco, Rosa Gala, Sonia Guadalupe and Ana Goncalves combined for 29 D'Agosto points.

Dongue headlined the All-Star Five and was joined by Diarra (Senegal), Sarah Zeinab Chan (South Sudan), Ana Suzana Jaime (Mozambique) and naturalised Angolan Italee Lucas. Not a single Angola-born was amongst the top performers.

Wonder who was named MVP? Dongue was.

Back in Mozambique, local newspaper "A Verdade" headlined: "Mozambican Leia Dongue offers D'Agosto African title." 

A quick look back at Angola's AfroBasket Women 2015 campaign, and it becomes clear why the two-time continental champions need to do the homework.

They finished fourth in the African championship a couple of months ago in Yaounde, Cameroon, and as result failed to securing a place in next summer's Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournament. 

In the past few years the Angola Basketball Federation has been working tirelessly to promote and expand the game to the rest of the 18-province country, but so far, it’s proven challenging. And sponsorship seems to be the major issue.

The national championship usually consists of four Luanda-based teams and one or two teams from the rest of the country. But the competitiveness gap between the capital city teams and the rest of the teams remains gigantic.

Players such as Rosa Gala, Nadir Manuel and Luisa Tomas, who hail from the provinces, needed to relocate to the capital Luanda to maximise their basketball talent, otherwise they would have remained in anonymity. 

While National Army-funded D'Agosto and InterClube - backed by the National Police - tend to attract the best national and international players, teams such as Maculusso live the dilemma of many other clubs across the continent. 

Perhaps, D’Agosto’s success as well as Maculusso’s poor showing should work as a starting point to relaunch the women’s game in Angola. And, of course, sponsorship needs to play a part in order to better distribute the the growth of the game in the country. 

Julio Chitunda

FIBA

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