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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.