BERLIN \u2014 Ezi Magbegor scored 21 points as Australia reached the final phase of the Women\u2019s Basketball World Cup with a physical 87-71 win over Turkey on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Turkey, led by Sevgi Uzun with 24 points, was down 8-0 at the start but fought back after a timeout to lead 15-14. That was brief, however, as the Opals rallied to end the first quarter 21-15 up and they did not relinquish the lead for the rest of the game.<\/p>\n
Turkey\u2019s Goksen Fitik went off with what appeared to be a right-ankle injury in the third quarter but she returned in the fourth.<\/p>\n
The Australian team features seven World Cup debutants. Team captain Sami Whitcomb of the WNBA\u2019s Phoenix Mercury had to withdraw before the tournament with a lingering knee injury.<\/p>\n
Australia next plays European champion Belgium on Monday in a showdown that will likely decide which side progresses directly to the quarterfinals as group winner. Australia, after two wins, is already assured of at least a playoff place in the final phase of the competition.<\/p>\n
Belgium faced Puerto Rico in their second group game later Sunday.<\/p>\n
Also later, the United States played Italy with\u00a0Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers\u00a0bidding to stretch the Americans\u2019 winning run to 32 games. The U.S. hasn\u2019t lost a game at the World Cup since the semifinal game of the 2006 tournament.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, China with\u00a0seven-foot-three Zhang Ziyu\u00a0was playing the Czech Republic with both teams looking for their first wins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BERLIN \u2014 Ezi Magbegor scored 21 points as Australia reached the final phase of the Women\u2019s Basketball World…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":885525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":["post-885524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/885525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}