MEDIA: After China’s Buzzer Beater Against Japan U, Are Our Local Netizens Being Too Harsh?

On September 5th, in yesterday’s Asian Championship U18 men’s basketball group stage, China U18 defeated Japan 68-66. After the game, media personality @StarXia Australian Basketball commented on this match.

The original post reads as follows:

I took a look at the comment section on the official Japanese Basketball Association’s Instagram, and surprisingly there wasn’t a single negative comment or any abusive language. Even though their fourth-quarter offense was so poor, aside from players No. 14 and No. 7, I didn’t see any particularly strong players.

All the replies were along the lines of ‘We will win next time/I support you.’

Putting ourselves in their shoes, are we being too harsh on our young national team players?

Is it possible that abroad, apart from the Olympics and the World Cup, these U-series competitions aren’t taken very seriously?

For example, when the Australian U17 national team performed poorly in the World Cup, there was no criticism at all. Instead, in my comment section, many fans commented that the level was not good, truly poor, slow, and weak.

Last night, we indeed won by 2 points, but this also masked quite a few issues. The final is likely to still be a showdown between China and Australia, and I think the difference won’t be too large, maybe around 15 points. I don’t doubt Zhang Boyuan’s clutch performance; I want to see how the Xun brothers and Wang Hongze perform against the inside defense and rebounding of Goc/Ajak/Jack Whitburn. This is also the key to whether the game can remain close, considering that we lost 16 rebounds throughout the game to a much shorter Japanese national youth team, including 10 offensive rebounds grabbed by them, while we only managed to grab 3 offensive rebounds. Given the significant height difference between the two teams, this should not have happened.