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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.