Today, on September 5, the men's National basketball team of Ukraine will play their third match of the group round of the European Championship, where it will oppose the Italian team.

According to the website of the Basketball Federation of Ukraine, the team of Ainars Bagatskis made a positive start to their performances at the European Championship, beating Great Britain and Estonia, leading sextet C after two game days. The minimum task has already been completed and there are high hopes that this will be enough to advance to the playoffs.

After the day off, there are two games against the favourites of the group ahead, where our boys will not be required to win, but in case of a successful game it will be possible to stick of the result.

We played with today's opponent, the Italian national team, recently. On August 24, our team had every chance to defeat Italians, confidently led after the first half of the game, but could not keep the advantage. Today we will have a chance for revenge, because that game showed that we can play with this Italy and we can defeat them.

Italy started the European Championship with a victory over Estonia 83:62, and lost to Greece 81:85 in the second tour. Despite the close result, Italians never led.

Simone Fontecchio is currently sixth in the EuroBasket list of scorers, averaging 22.5 points per game. Achille Polonar is in the top 5 of the tournament in terms of rebounds, and one of the best assists is Marko Spissu. Athough, even without them, Italy has enough players to watch out for.

This one will be the fifth official game for the rivals. The head-to-head advantage is currently held by Italy, who won EuroBasket 2005 and EuroBasket 2017, plus the last game in qualifications for the 2023 World Cup, nevertheless, we had a victory at the EuroBasket 2013 play-off that took us to the World Cup of 2014.

The match Italy-Ukraine will be broadcast by the XSPORT TV channel at 10:00 p.m. Kyiv time.