Unbelievable games were seen last weekend in Taiwan in Asia. They were played during the Tainan Challenger which was the 15th Challenger in 2022. A lion called Ub woke up again and triumphed in excellent atmosphere and we can say they are recovered from recent sufferings.
Let’s see briefly what happened on October 22-23.
Jeddah was the best team in qualifying group A. Changhua got a ticket for the main tournament in qualifying draw B.
Group stage fixtures were played on Saturday.
Ub and Utsunomiya qualified for the best 8 phase from pool A.
Antwerp and Warsaw earned tickets for the quarterfinals from group B
Sakiai and Jeddah progressed from group C to the elimination stage.
Ulaanbaatar and Belgrade were first-placed and second-placed teams in pool D.
Quarterfinals, semifinals, and final games were scheduled on October 23, 2022.
Ub won against Jeddah with 21-16. Ulaanbaatar defeated Warsaw with 19-10. Antwerp beat Partizan with 17-15. Sakiai pulled out an 18-12 victory over Utsunomiya in the last quarterfinal.
In the first semifinal, Ub beat Ulaanbaatar with 20-17. Antwerp won against Sakiai with 19-15.
The final was played between Ub and Antwerp in the rematch of the Debrecen Masters final game.
Antwerp got an early 5-0 advantage, but this didn’t shake the Serbian guys. Ub slowly started to decrease the point deficit and suddenly it was a tied result: 5-5. From that point, the teams were very close and no club had a bigger advantage.
Thibaut Vervoort, the star of Antwerp, made a layup in the closing seconds of the match to level the scores: 14-14. The game went to overtime where Dejan Majstorovic from Ub scored an amazing two-point shot that closed the final and brought Ub the long-awaited title.
You can watch the full final game here:
Strahinja Stojacic, player from Ub, got an award for MVP of the competition. The best scorer of the tournament was the same player with 42 scored points.
Winner and runner-up of Tainan Challenger qualified for the first-ever Hong Kong Masters on November 26-27, 2022.
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