From Game Program 1st December v. Aston Athletics.

This coaches corner isn’t easy to write. We haven’t won for a while now, and we were downright awful last Saturday. What’s really hard isn’t to stay optimistic, because we have shown we have the ability to play with anyone this year. What’s hard is to convince anyone not on the team or with the team every day, that this is the case.

The teams we’ve played in League play this year have a combined record of 10 wins and 1 loss – in other words, we have played a lot of he good teams in the league. That’s no excuse, though. If we are going to end up where we think we can end up, we need to beat the good teams.

Was there anything in the two games last weekend, which would indicate that we might play along for the playoffs? For Saturday, the answer is a clear no! We were horrible! There is no other word for it. Cardiff played every player on the bench – even the 7 footer who could hardly dunk the ball. And they still won doing that. Cardiff is a good team, a favourite to get promoted in my eyes, but they’re not THAT good!

The Sunday game was different. We let the players loose a little, and by the second half we were playing some pretty good basketball. The bench was in the game all along, really being the sixth man. Defence improved immensely. After being down 15 at halftime, we cut it to 5 with four minutes remaining, only to have Robbie Parker’s catch and shoot 3-pointer get taken away by a travelling call. Still, with a minute remaining we cut it to five, but Cardiff made their foul shots to hold on to the game.

In the Sunday game Cardiff didn’t play their bench players. They played with every thing they had, and this team, that has won all but one game of the season, had to fight to hold onto the game. We played all 11 players at least 15 minutes each. Give us five more minutes, and I say we win – as American Football legend Vince Lombardi said once: “We didn’t loose that game, we just ran out of time!”.

In a game like that, the result is secondary (especially as the result actually didn’t matter to us, as we were out of the Patrons Cup no matter the result). Every player on that court knew that we were playing well. Everyone knew that we were playing for a full game in a way that we have only played for maybe 15 minutes combined for the whole season. We didn’t make any runs; we just played good, hard nosed basketball, the way it’s supposed to be played.

And we had a loud bench support us, the way I hope you, the crowd, will support us tonight!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 7:30 am and is filed under Coaches Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.