If you missed part 1, scroll down to get the heads up.

Day two and after a big night on the town of Manchester, a £12 breakfast that Sylvane is still shaking his head about, and we’re off to the basketball centre again. We all were feeling pretty confident about ourselves, thinking we’d worked out who our next opponents were.

Velocity were in for a rude awakening that crispy Sunday morning, as KPMG came out on the court with the aim to win and not get intimidated. KPMG had this superstar three point shooter. I don’t use that term very lightly. He was taking shots from places you seriously wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to reach the basket much less get them in, but he was draining them left right and centre. Fade away threes, falling down, with 2 people marking him and yet he’d still make them in.

Fortunately for us Nick was taking notes, since we were set to play the winner of this game. The game started off, and KPMG scored a quick 3. Nick answered back straight away with another 3. The first 35 minutes of the game was a show of complete harmonised team. Some how somewhere our old problem of defeating in the last 5 minutes of a game came back to haunt us, and from a 13 point lead, the last 1 minute of the game was spent trying hard not to let anyone score a single point. Hamish got fouled in the last 30 seconds and went to the foul line we’re 3 points ahead. No score change after Hamish’s free throws, and KPMG have the ball for the offensive. They got 2 three point shots out, fortunately none of them hit their target.

Time was called and we’d made it into the semi-finals. We made it harder on ourselves to win that game but win it we did. Our opponent in the semi-finals were the local band of Mercs, The Roccos.

Now I call them Mercs, although I could be completely off base here and the guys might actually work for whoever it is they work for, but something tells me that they’re a local team, with a nice selection of large dirty players. Dirty because they play hard using elbows and any other attack at their disposal to bully teams into not going for drives, not playing hard defence etc.

These guys were big. Just physically big. They had their professionally printed shirts and kits, their own mini bus and a group of pretty cheer leaders to I guess cheer them on.

End of the first half and we were 2 points down. 16-14. This was seriously something none of us expected. The team to beat and here we had them on the ropes. At this point I’m going to hammer the referees but please don’t see this as bad grapes. It’s just that the refs in the tournament were seriously young and inexperienced. Not all of them mind you but a healthy cross section of them.

Unfortunately we had a problem with one of the refs who was no more than 20 years old or something that had to confirm every single call from the other ref, and couldn’t stand up even though he knew it was a wrong call or whatever. The other ref was just making some rules as he went along. It’s tough playing a game against such a strong opponent and the ref not being able to at least make some decent calls. We didn’t have this problem with any of the other refs, just with 2 of them.

Unfortunately that fire we had in the first half disappeared in the second half, and we ended up with our first defeat. None of us were upset by this, as this was effectively our first defeat and we’d already achieved a better result to last year.

We had one more team, bunch of Kiwi’s who obviously had played together, as they were calling various plays, were all pretty big in general, but well tempered and generally pleasant to play against. In another time or place we would have had them, but our game against the Rocco’s did wipe out our resources and our offence didn’t have the bite it did earlier that morning. Final result was 4th place in a 16 team tournament.

The greatest thing about a weekend like that though is the team bonding. It’s a great feeling being part of a team that tries it’s best to achieve something. It seems that it’s been a mantra that one man can make a difference. That’s true, but a team working towards that difference is better, because at the end of it all and after time has passed by the memories of that particular time are there to be shared, and will be that much more poignant.