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The Uganda men’s national basketball team, the Silverbacks, captain Jimmy Enabu says they will go all-out against Senegal in their opening 2021 AfroBasket game with the hope of securing a victory over the five-time champions.
Uganda will take on Senegal on Wednesday evening at the Kigali Arena in Rwanda with all games live on StarTimes.
Ahead of the game, Silverbacks captain Jimmy Enabu says the team is privileged to be at the AfroBasket finals again and they are mentally prepared for the games.
“First of all, we feel privileged to be here again,” Enabu said before adding that; “We feel we have enough support from home and that already is good for us.”
“So in regards to how we have been preparing, the team is where we have to be mentally to be begin with and we had a few people coming in yesterday (Arthur Kaluma and Deng Geu) so the full team is around and we can’t ask for more because we have had a couple of days to prepare and that’s all we need because the competition is here, no more excuses”
The Silverbacks were impressive during qualifications for this tournament as they won three of their four games and with that comes some bit of pressure for the team to perform better than the last two consecutive editions but Enabu says the team is perceiving it in a way that they have a job to do.
“I wouldn’t look at it as pressure but I would look at it as expectations.”
“As you know with expectations comes some kind of pressure but the way we are perceiving it is we have a job to do.”
“We know we can do it and we have to go and show it so versing Senegal today is a big test for us but we embracing it and we will go all out hoping for victory.”
The Silverbacks captain also says he expects an all-rounded game from Senegal because they are an athletic team that is so good both inside and outside the arc.
“Senegal is a tall athletic team. They have good inside and outside presence so it’s going to be like an all-rounded game so we need to be on our A-game and that’s what we expect to do.”
This will be their third successive appearance at the finals having participated in both the 2015 and 2017 editions during which they failed to progress past the group stages and have never won in group stages.
Meanwhile, Senegal has been at all but, one AfroBasket tournament. They have also won it five times, the second joint-best record alongside Egypt with only Angola (11) winning it more than them. They lost to Nigeria in the semifinals in the 2017 edition.
