«Astana» entered the new year with another confident victory over the Kostanay «Tobol»

The basketball club «Astana» held the first game in 2022 — a match within the National League against Kostanay «Tobol». Initially, the series was supposed to take place in Kostanay, but according to the agreements, it was moved to the capital, while “Tobol” is the nominal host. Our team was the clear favorite of the game and won another confident victory. Skylar Spencer and Anthony Hickey were announced by Darko Russo for this match from American players, and Mark Tikhonenko, Vadim Shcherbak, and Maxim Marchuk joined them at the start of the game.

After the jumping ball competition, the ball remained with the players of our team, but neither they nor the guests were able to realize their first attacks. At the end of the first minute of the match, Vadim Shcherbak opened the total score of the match from an average distance, and then Anthony Hickey brought our advantage to 4 points. The Kostanay players, on their turn, opened their score in the game, but immediately missed a serious breakthrough from the capital's team, in which Mark Tikhonenko, Maxim Marchuk, and Anthony Hickey scored goals, and our advantage for the first time in the match became double-digit. Tikhonenko scored the first three-pointer in the game, and by the middle of the quarter Hickey, Marchuk and Aitkali updated their accounts. The difference in the score quickly exceeded 15 points. In the next three minutes, only Skylar Spencer opened his account in the game, and Tobol slightly reduced the gap. In the last minutes of the qualifying period, Dmitry Gavrilov converted an and-one, Maxim Marchuk scored 2 more points, and Rustam Murzagaliev scored his first points in the match with an accurate shot from behind the arc. But this did not greatly affect the difference in the score — «Astana» won at the beginning of the meeting with the score of 21:31. At first, in the second quarter, the difference remained around 10 points, but then our team began to move forward. Points were earned by Rustam Murzagaliev, Anthony Hickey, Nikolai Bazhin, and Dmitry Gavrilov. Bazhin scored a couple of free throws, after which our advantage exceeded 20 points.  Spencer and Aitkali increased the advantage of «Astana» even further before the middle of the quarter. As a result, “Astana” was leading by 24 points. The guests had a good segment of the game, reducing their backlog, and in our team in the second half of the second period, Shcherbak, Bazhin, Murzagaliev, and Tikhonenko scored two points each. Our team left for the long break with a significant advantage — 37:60.



In the first half of the third quarter,  Maxim Marchuk, Anthony Hickey,  Nikolai Bazhin and Dmitry Gavrilov caused a lot of problems for Tobol by scoring multiple points. In the meantime, the Kostanay players were also quite active on the court, but by the middle of the quarter, they lost a couple more points. Anthony Hickey and Maxim Marchuk were actively earning points for «Astana» in the second half of the third period, and towards the end of the quarter, after two points from Skylar Spencer, the capital's handicap reached the milestone of 30 points — 52:82. The thirty-point advantage is very large and one period was not enough for him to win back, especially with such a development of the game. Therefore, there were no doubts about the victory of our team. Moreover, our rivals at the start of the final ten-minute game frankly did not stick. It took them more than three minutes to open a score in the quarter. Skylar Spencer scored twice in our team, and Ruslan Aitkali scored two points. Closer to the middle, Rustam Murzagaliyev earned four points in a row, and our gap was already close to 40 points. After three-pointers from Vadim Shcherbak and Andrey Litvinenko, Astana's advantage overcame the milestone of forty points, and then Shcherbak brought his team's score to 100 points. Ruslan Aitkali scored two more points and, as it turned out, put an end to the game, as the teams spent the last minutes without results. “Astana” again turned out to be stronger than “Tobol”, having won this game with a final score of 60:102.
 
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Consequences: «Astana» is still unbeaten in the National League and only strengthens its position in the first line, while «Tobol» is falling further and further behind the third place in the table.

Next match: The rematch of the series with «Tobol» will take place tomorrow, January 20, also in Nur-Sultan at the arena of the Saryarka cycle track.  The match starts at 19:30 Nur-Sultan time. Online broadcast of the game will be available on the main page of our website.

Detailed information about the tournament, tournament tables, schedule, and results of matches are published in the Tournaments section.