Veteran shooting guard Kenneth Gasana has insisted that the players are optimistic about staging a better showing in Widow 2 of the African Basketball Championship (Afrobasket) qualifiers as the national team departs for Tunisia. Weekend Sport understands the national team, along with South Sudan who held their training camp in Kigali, head to Tunisia Friday night, at 8pm CAT, aboard a chartered RwandAir flight. Rwanda put up an abysmal performance in the first window qualifiers held in Kigali last November, failing to win a single game out of three games they played against Mali, Nigeria and South Sudan. The Tunisian city of Monastir will host the second window qualifiers from February 17 to 21. In an interview on Wednesday, Gasana, 36, told this publication that morale in the team was high and all the players were ready for the challenge. “I noticed this even before I did the training session with the team. Everyone is ready to compete and improve, which is a great attitude that a team that wants to win,” he said. Gasana, who made his international debut for Rwanda in 2009, joined the team camp last Friday, about two weeks after the home-based players had started training. Rwanda goes into the competition having already secured a ticket to Afrobasket 2021 finals as the host country of the competition, which will run from August 24 through September 5 at Kigali Arena. Nonetheless, Gasana says the team has a lot to prove. “It is great that we already have a ticket as the host nation, but, we have a lot to prove. We were disappointed with our results in the first window, so the hunger to do better is high,” he said. “This is a prideful group of guys (the national team), so we want to bounce back and represent the country properly. That is our number one motivation.” He pointed out that the team had lessons to learn from last November’s poor performance. “It was important to analyse and learn from our failures and winless streak in the first window. We are all ready for challenge in Tunisia, we all want to do better.” Asked if the team could be on a revenge mission to win all their games in Monastir, Gasana said that he and his teammates would put in maximum effort for positive results. “It is impossible to guarantee victory in sport, but one can guarantee maximum effort from the team,” said Gasana, noting that he expects the team to be keen on small details so they can manage better late-game situations.
