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Hi all,

In season 67 we will battle in the consolation tournament. As always minimum expectations are to reach the knockout rounds and then we will see how far we can progress from there.

Our draw for the qualifying stage has been somewhat kind, giving us Columbia away as one of our top ranked opponents. Not that it will be a straight forward game, but is an easier draw than what we could have got. We’ve also drawn two really tough teams at the end of the qualifying round in Croatia and Estonia, so we need to make sure our qualification is secured by then. Here is the full draw:
Gameweek 1- Armenia (home)- ranked 55
Gameweek 2- Columbia (away)- ranked 29
Gameweek 3- Costa Rica (home)- ranked 96
Gameweek 4- Puerto Rico (away)- ranked 58
Gameweek 5- Wales (home)- ranked 62
Gameweek 6- New Zealand (away)- ranked 74
Gameweek 7- Croatia (home)- ranked 16
Gameweek 8- Estonia (away)- ranked 39

England 108-67 Armenia (78020)

Very strong start to the season with a 41 point win over Armenia. This puts us in 6th place behind 2 teams who got 50-0 wins, 2 teams who played against 3-man lineups and Chile who played the lowest ranked u21 NT team. So achieving a 41 point win is great for the first week. In addition to this, we didn’t have the best gameshape this week with some key players limited to bench roles. Despite the lower gameshape of the bench players, they had some great contributions such as MacTear’s 16 points in 16mins, Landray’s 11 points, 5 rebounds and 6 assists in 17mins and Weston’s 8 points, 7 rebounds and 6 blocks in 16minutes. But it was Royannais and Emslie dominating the scoring with 26 and 22 points respectively.

We next face Columbia away in what is a crucial game in our season. Columbia will be one of the tougher teams we face and a loss would really make the games and Croatia and Estonia important for us. However a win would give us a great opportunity to build towards the knockout rounds

Last edited by arrowspg5 at 1/15/2025 5:08:32 PM

England 86-71 Columbia (78094)

We got the important win against Columbia which puts us in a good position to reach the knockout rounds. The preparation for the game wasn’t great with Rickards getting injured, leaving us light at the big positions. His loss caused us to have some rebounding issues, but the young bigs Bourne and Barker locked the paint down combining for 17 blocks between them, and the team getting 29 blocks in total. On the offensive end, another incredible performance as Royannais went off for 45 points with only 2 FTM, that’s a whole lot of buckets!

The win puts us at 2-0 with a number of weaker opponents coming up. Time to tick off the wins and the aim is to get as high PD as possible. We next face Costa Rica at home which should be a comfortable win as we look to build on our strong start to the campaign

England 138-77 Costa Rica (78109)

Great all round team performance as we, as expected, dominated Costa Rica. All players in the set rotation had at least +23 +/- which shows our bench guys also performed well, making us strong across all 48minutes. Royannais continued his incredible season as he followed up his 45 point performance with 25 points in 20minutes off the bench to top score. Landray (23pts), Broderick (22pts) and MacTear (20pts) also added 20 or more points in the game.

Good win for us against Costa Rica, a +61 PD win is great for us to help with our seeding. For reference, Portugal only got a +38 PD win last week which shows how good our result is for the season.

We next travel back to South America to face Puerto Rico. They're currently 2-1 on the season, including an impressive home win over Finland. They did use CT in this game, so we should have a strong enthusiasm advantage making the game a bit easier. I am aiming for another big PD win to further strengthen their position in the standings.

England 95-67 Puerto Rico (78171)

Another win ticked off, taking us to 4-0 on the season with a healthy points difference. Puerto Rico have been aggressive with their GDP predictions this season, so choice of tactics was mainly to avoid that guess which we managed to do. Although the offence wasn’t very effective for us in the game. I did also predict that they would attack inside which is why I switched to man to man rather than 3-2 zone to help us inside, which did work well. Landray top scored with 26 points, with 6 more players adding between 8-12 points. Was hoping for a bigger win, but a win is a win and we move on to the next game.

Our next game is against our neighbours Wales at home. The game result should be a formality, but once again we are looking for as big a win as possible to help our PD before going in to 3 difficult games against New Zealand (a), Croatia (h) and Estonia (a)

England 117-68 Wales (78217)

A 49 point win over our neighbours Wales as Royannais scored 25 points in 24mins tea off the bench. The focus of the game was to achieve as big PD as possible as this was our last game against low ranked opponents. Defensively we looked to restrict the Welsh guard Mack as he had been by far their best scorer this season, that went well as he finished with only 8 points on 3-17 FG. However their second guard Griffiths took advantage and scored 23 points as their only player to reach double figures.

This result has put us up to 2nd in the table which is obviously a really strong position to be in at this stage of the season. Despite this we are definitely not safe just yet with 3 tough games coming up. We next face New Zealand away, a team that beat us recently in a scrimmage, who have 3 losses already and a fighting for qualification still. We then have Croatia (4-1) and Estonia (5-0) who both have strong teams this season and will cause us some major trouble.

England 94 - 62 New Zealand (78247)

Given New Zealand beat us in a scrimmage towards the end of last season (with the current squads we have), I was expecting a tough game playing them away, which wasn't the case. First half our offence struggled to get going, but when it did in the 2nd half it was game over pretty quickly.

Given New Zealand already had 3 losses, it was a game they needed to win to hold any hope of reaching the knockout rounds, so I expected them to go with more effort, but I held confidence that with a correct prediction we would be strong enough to still win, which showed to be correct.

The win now puts us at 6-0 with a healthy +226 PD, which has us 2nd in the table as it stands, only 2 points behind Estonia. But we now face 2 tough challenges against Croatia at home (5-1) and Estonia away (6-0), so maintaining our unbeaten qualification record may not be possible, but hopefully we can continue to be competitive and achieve a home tie for the knockout rounds.

England 78-67 Croatia (78277)

A strong win for us against the 18th ranked Croatia puts us at 7-0, and guarantees that we will have at least 1 home game in the knockout phase, which is a big advantage to have. I opted to go with more effort in this game as I believe having home court advantage in the knockouts is more beneficial than having the higher enthusiasm. As with all our games this season, it was our defence that held firm and gave us the opportunity to win. Only 2 teams have scored more than 70 points against us so far this season, Columbia who scored 71 and Costa Rica who scored 77 (this was RNG vs RNG so was naturally a higher scoring game). If we can continue to hold teams to less than 70 points we have a chance to win any game.

We next face another unbeaten team in Estonia, who currently sit at the top of the standings and are +30 PD better than every other team. Their team this season looks to be incredibly strong. I doubt we will be able to maintain our unbeaten record, but wee in a position to still finish with a good seed for the knockouts

England 50 - 76 Estonia (78327)

Our unbeaten campaign comes to an end as expected against a very strong Estonia side, who have no achieved the top seed in the tournament. This game I had no expectation of being able to win, hence the throw of the dice of a double GDP, if that hits then maybe we get an upset, but chances were still slim. On a positive note, our defence still performed well in holding them to only 76 points despite the double incorrect GDP guess. Our issue in this game was on the offensive end only scoring 50 points. The idea of the offence was to aim to score through SG and SF in hope of a mismatch there, but the 3-2 hurt us a lot with MacTear and Royannais combining to shoot 8-42FG, but Castledine did a reasonable job from the bench shooting 50%.

We now move on to the knockout phase as the 12th seed and face Romania at home. It appears they will have an enthusiasm advantage over us, but with HCA i believe we are strong enough to still get the win. The winner of this game is rewarded with a 2nd round game against Israel or Venezuela, most likely Israel.

England 86-65 Romania (78609)

I was expecting a tough game from Romania, they have multiple strong bigs who have been causing teams issues all season. But thankfully for us, their GS was poor this week which hurt their strength inside. Our win was also helped by the double incorrect GDP guess, which I had expected from them. They had used a lot of GDP this season, so I chose to change tactics to avoid this and it worked very well for us. PTB worked very well for our starters who dominated the game and put the game beyond doubt pretty early on.

We next face Israel in the 2nd round. Israel have one of the strongest teams in the competition, and we stand a very little chance of pulling off an upset. Maybe our strong defence can give us a chance, but with less enthusiasm, worse GS and their HCA it would take a miracle to pull off the win, but I'll do the best I can

England 66-82 Israel (78667)

Well as expected we have been eliminated. We had a very little chance of winning because Israel have a really strong team and also had HCA and enthusiasm advantage over us. I did all I could getting the double correct GDP and going with CT effort but our guys ran out of steam in the 4th quarter. We were able to be competitive for 3 quarters and then our offence died and it was game over before we knew it. Israel were the first team to score over 80 points against us this season which shows our defensive strength, but our offence was always going to struggle. To have a chance of winning we needed to limit them to no more than 75 points and we weren't able to do that.

we now move on to scrimmages for the rest of the season. At this point I would usually use a full u20 squad in preparation for next season, but as we have a lot of high potential guys aged 21 who could make the NT team in the future I have decided that I'm going to run with those guys to get them some experience for the future, and then fill the team out with the 20yo guys.

Overall I think it was a successful campaign. We matched our performance from 2 seasons ago, and our only losses came in away games against 2 of the top 4 seeded teams. We had good wins against a strong Croatia team and comfortable win in the 1st KO round against Romania as well as crusiing through most of the seeding games.