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Hi all!

We're back for a new adventure in the Consolation tournament.

First of all, I'm very happy with the balance in the team. At first sight I thought we can go far in the tournament, started it off with a 2-0 and PD +102. It gives us a nice advantage so we are currently 4th in the standings.

But I'm not very optimistic, because I've seen our new opponents and during the last games we meet a strong Australia and France. Both are played in our house, but if we want to go far we should win those 2 games. This will be hard but not impossible because we have the home advantage.

Next up is Iran, ranked 28 in the U21 world ranking. The team looks weaker than ours, and since we play at home this game should result in a win. We should cruise towards our home game against Australia, who's slightly weaker than ours (in theory) but game shapes will be important and it's too early to say how ours will be.

Stay tuned for this interesting campaign!

Best of luck Warrior !

And here we are, an easy win against 5 players of Puerto Rico leads us to a 5-0 and the 3th spot in the tournament. The next game against Australia will be the 1st tough match. They have beaten Saudi Arabia at home but lost some enthousiasm with their first home game against a stronger Denmark (with a W as a result).

Hopefully our general GS will be beter than this week, 8/15 have 9 GS, but we should do better because 2 players have 7 or lower. Nothing to worry, but the bigger weeks are coming and we need every team squad member.
I still have some players on the radar to join our U21. Once their GS is better, they can join if necessary.

Let's see how our result will turn out against Australia!

Indeed a nice result :)

Beside a good GDP and a better enthousiasm, Australia came too short to win in the Inferno of OM Stars.
Our general GS was better than last week (everybody 8 or 9), so I didn't want to put more effort in the game than TIE.
We collected 46 rebounds (against 33 for Australia) and we gave 33 assists, what was an overall good performance by our youngsters to lead us to a 23 point deficit win.

In the standings our competitors had easy opponents, which means that we are currently 5th in the race. Next week we'll face a young Marocco (3 x 21yr olds, 7 x 20yr olds, 6 x 19yr olds and 1 x 18yr old). We should win this one easily so we can increase our PD towards the game against France.

France U21 @ Belgium U21 85 - 73 (57638)

Before the game, the French coach contacted me to play both TIE. I agreed with this.

After a perfect 6-0 in the previous games, it was the first game I expected a loss. With our perfect enthousiasm, I didn't want to waste it against France, because we were going to the 2nd round anyway.

So I've set up my line-up on Friday. Reconsidered it ons Sunday and hoped for no injuries on Saturday night. Our GS was far from perfect, so our best chances were to play with 9 players. I was sure team France was going to play inside, that was a correct focus in the GDP. I tought their tactic would be LI, because maybe they wanted to go higher on the ranking and their GS was much better than ours. But they want for LP. Altough a tough (but expected) loss.

In the end, my decision to play TIE was a good one. We finished 7th, so we will have the HCA for the next 2 games before playing in Spain.

Our first game is against Hungary. A good team with lower enthousiasm. Hopefully our GS will be better than this week...

Losing by 12 against France is far from horrible.

Hungary U21 @ Belgium U21: 85-119 (57834)


I made my line-up on friday after the weekly training updates. Several key players were in excellent shape. But on Saturday our guard Beau Smits had an injury, so we could not count on him for the match against Hungary. Too bad because his manager just sent me that his GS was perfect. Maxime Becue replaced him in the squad.

I felt that if we want to get the most out of this tournament, I should go for a TIE. It was a risk, altough not impossible to win because of our HCA. I knew Hungary would play a CT, so I decided to go for a GDP only when I was sure about it. After some analysis there were 2 options:

My first opinion was to go for a slow pace. The Hungarian manager love to play princeton and patient. I wasn't sure if he was trying to get his best player to score or go for a 3 point contest. Anyway I told our youngsters to defend in a 3-2 zone, which could break both tactics.
After more thinking and analyzing I went for my second option, I was sure that Hungary would play motion or princeton. So I went for an outside tactic and removed the slow pace and my experience told me to set nothing if I wasn't sure.

For our attacking play: the Hungarian manager didn't use his GDP during his campaign as U21 coach. So I went for the obvious one, going with a LI because of our GS and DMI.

It was nail biting up to the game to see what they were going to do. And first thing I've seen was a perfect GDP. They went for a motion, MTM and no GDP. We took off with a perfect start. An amazing 3th quarter led us to a victory with no waste of enthousiasm. Mission accomplished.

Fun note about our game: we played with four 20 year olds. Arne, Ciel, Nemo and Maxime.

Next week we'll face a strong Serbia. They've won their home game against Indonesia, also with a TIE.
We'll go for another nice result.

In the other fixtures there were no actual surprises. The home teams could win their game, only Portugal (against France) and Ecuador (against Uruguay) lost it logically. Now the tournament can really begin }:>


Last edited by Splash_Brother at 11/17/2020 02:13:17

Serbia U21 - Belgium U21 88-80 (57883)

A game with the same enthousiasm.
A game we should have won in many cases. But the outcome is different...

At the half we were leading by 17!! The 2nd half was just horrible and we made too many fouls. We lost by the details aka freethrows and Serbia could take advantage of this. Too bad our adventure ends here, I'm really disappointed by the result.

During the campaign we lost against France and Serbia, both at home and with tiny losses. Both countries are still in the running...
When I look at our neighbours the Netherlands, who are also qualified for the quarter finals, well... that should have been us. That 7-1 was not enough and yet we had the team to go far. Our GS was good to excellent week after week.

But given the circumstances, I think everything went according to plan. The matches we had to win were won without wasting enthousiasm. That last game I didn't use the GDP. I wasn't 100% sure (balanced or inside). It was a 50-50% chance.

In the upcoming weeks there will be practice matches scheduled to prepare us for the next season.


Coach Warrior