Lionesses bounce back with win over South Sudan

National Women Basketball team, Kenya Lionesses, recovered from a horrid start to the ongoing FIBA Afrobasket Zone Five qualifiers to beat newbies South Sudan 66-48 in their second match. 

Felmas Koranga who traveled to Rwanda with injury fears stared for the George Mayienga-coached side scoring a game high 23 points that changed the tiding for Lionesses.  

"Coming off a loss, we were not happy so we had to redeem ourselves and we were all in for this win. Against Rwanda we lacked aggression, our shots were not dropping for some reason and today we worked on that and executed well. Everything worked because we identified 'hot hands' early in the match and we kept feeding the balls to those players and had to work hard on defense," said Koranga. 

The Lindsay Harding-coached South Sudanese side forced Lionesses to make avoidable errors in the first quarter, missing easy baskets and turnovers still plaguing the Kenyans. Mayienga's charges, however, managed to hold off the pressure for a 16-9 lead at the end of the period. 

Victoria Reynolds was the go-to scorer in the first quarter, bagging seven of Kenya's 16 points, an improvement from her opening match against Rwanda where she managed 5 points in the 12 minutes she was on the court. 

The second quarter was low scoring as South Sudan fought to reduce their deficit, restricting Kenya to just ten points but couldn't make use of their chances on the paint and their treys were not dropping this ended up making only five points for a 26-14 heading to the halftime break. 

Koranga was just getting started in the second quarter, scoring six of Kenya's ten points in the period. Reynolds contributed three while Mellisa Akinyi converted one free throw to extend Kenya's lead to 12 points into the break. 

What we can only imagine was Mayienga's pep talk at half time, combined with the players' determination to play a better game than they had in the first half saw Kenya execute better in the remaining two periods. 

Mercy Wanyama got the Lionesses off with a mid-range jumper 26 second into the second half to extend the lead to 28-14 and her teammates went on a scoring spree to stretch their advantage to 37-14 with 5.20 minutes to play in the third quarter. The Kenyans restricted Harding's charges yo just ten points in the third period as they scored 21 for a 47-24 heading into the final period. 

The 23-point difference was impossible for the South Sudanese to recover from despite outsmarting Kenya for a 24-19 lead in the final quarter and they picked their second loss, on their debut at the stage.