Trafford Basketball
I played basketball for Trafford in the Greater Manchester youth games on saturday the 12th of July at the City of Manchester Stadium.
There were only 3 teams competing in the basketball tournament; Trafford, Oldham and Bolton. The teams chosen to play were decided by 6 teams competing in monthly tournaments since feburary and the top three teams went through.
In the warm-up I was shooting like I'd not touched a basketball for a year, this really frustrated me... I really didnt want to let my team down... I was tired of Trafford being an average team and want to look proffessional when we play basketball.
We played our opening game against our rival team, Oldham. I expected myself to be nervous but I actualy felt relaxed and completely up for it and ready to 'kick some ass!!'.
We fell behind by 10 points early on in the game but that didnt daze us, we stayed focused on what we had to do and gained the lead by the end of the first half.
Oldham kept up there usuall shouting at the referies and bad sportsmanship and there big man even had me in a head-lock at 1 point, which I was awarded a freethrow for and possession at halfway.
We battled hard and played above my expectations for this team, apart from a few lappses in concentration on defence which resulted in us giving away easy and vital 2 pointers.
In the last minute we were down 7 points at 57 - 64, Oldham had possesion and tacktickly ran the clock. We fort for the ball hard and i got fouled out in the last 30 seconds.
We were over the limit for team fouls which means that anytime we fouled them they should have gone to the line for 2 shots which would have resulted in us having a good chance to take possession, unfortunately the refs missed this as frankly, they are quite shocking referies.
We lost the game and we knew that ourselves and Oldham would go on to beat bolton, resulting in 2 wins for Oldham and 1 win for us [Trafford] so at this point it loked that it was all on that game to decide it.
Our second game was against Bolton, despite having lost the deciding game and after a 3 hour wait, we were all cheerful and finished on a high.
In this game I disocvered how fun basketball is again and how fun it can be when playing with team-mates and a coach that everyone gets on with so well and can therefore 'have a laff with'.
We took an easy lead early on and built on it throughout the game to eventually win 64 - 37. This was due to Boltons sloppy passing and poor communication especially defensively.
I injured my ankle in the final quarter when I took a lay-up and landed on someones foot. I was encouraged to play through it and 'run it off', which I did but had to swap men on defense to guard a less threatening player.
Overall I had a great time despite coming second and I re-discovered how fun basketball can be, which is similar to what Steve Parry gave in an inspirational and quite emotional speech using his experiences of diving as an example at the s2r phase 3 launch evening...
