I never blogged in detail of my amateur league games before. But for the benefit of many of my teammates who were away, and the fact I only played 4mins with injured wrists and had to focus on coaching or in my own ways strategically managing the team - this is my account of what happened resulting in an 3-point upset 55-52 over last season's #1 team.
So we lost to Victorious Secrets last season twice and they were clearly a stronger team with lots of scorers and inside rebounding presence. But we won't going to go down this season without a fight to the #1 team. Coming strong from a lucky 1 point first win last week for the Spartans, and I was unable to partake of the celebrations as I was in Cambodia. I really want to feel the winning ways again, but suddenly we found year-end work and overseas schedules taking away our starting line ups and our big guys were all unable to play against the formidable team.
On Thurs, we only had 4 guys and no coach/manager. But our manager made some calls to get back our old fogeys who have laid off balling for months due to work and managed to get 10 guys down vs VS's 9 guys. Still it was a insurmountable pressure to play good defense and offense with the "rojak" at hand.
Started the game with half court pressure to run down the opponents then realised we were quick to score 6 points but gave up 9 faster from the lack of perimeter shooting defense. They took treys easily, realising the issue at hand, I called for a substitution to see the game from the sidelines and made subsequent calls to go back to perimeter defense and lose the half court man-mark pressure. Again their fast passes and strong rebounds made it easier for their taller guys to shoot treys. I think we gave up 10 3-pointers in this game even though we switched to 3-2 formation early in the first quarter. VS was clearly rotating well with their #23's hot shooting. But our strategies were still working well, we never gave up believing in the plays we were making and the constant checking of the foul troubles of our teammates as well as the opponents helped. We rotated our guys knowing we have 2 guys in foul trouble of 4 fouls, while they had one guy fouled out and many more with 3-4 fouls. We played strong inside drawing fouls, but unable to capitalized from the missing Free Throws.
We never lost hope, calling time outs to remain in focus on what we are doing and who has to do what. And always reminding the team - WE CAN WIN THIS! So in the crunch time though we were down 12 points at one point in the 3rd quarter, we played smart as VS bench got hot and threw things, making lots of noise - Spartans are used to it and kept our emotions at bay and our adrenaline at hand. Our main scoring centre was with 4 fouls. I kept him out of the game till late 4th quarter with the other teammates bucking up and keeping the defense tight and 2 crucial treys kept us close. Unfortunately our PG Keith being quick with steals was fouled out, but our bench players kept up.
Sure we made mistakes, fired unnecessary shots but we must keep shouting at our teammates, its ok; its alright..we will get it back. The confidence amongst ourselves have to be kept up. This is a team, this is Spartans. And when the final whistle blows, we did what we came out to do and the unanswered points have all been proven. I had finally felt what the usual coach felt, to have playing time distributed yet make strong calls to substitute players who need to get back their focus. I thank my teammates for their understanding, the sacrifice is sweet when the win is hard fought.
So the celebrations goes into the night, needed a whole Sunday to recover and still trying to find out what exactly happened. But thanks to my Bros for getting me home safe.
Point to note, the Filipinos referees are always my favourite - sharp and unbiased. There were frequent walking calls, uncalled fouls but they were consistent on both ends. Consistencies are very important in a closely matched game.
