Well, we did what we needed to do against UAE - chalk up a solid win.
Our win over Croatia has given us the luxury of trialling some things over the next couple of weeks so we have a good reading of what sort of options we have come the knock out games.
Long time big man Bridesmaid Ian Bill is loving the space created by the recent retirements of some long time gun bigs and is thriving at PF, while our Laga-aia and Cull got to have a run in some new spots. Laga went bang, Cull not so much, but he was probably further out of position. There's more to learn.
The win pushes us up to 34th in the seedings, two spots out and we've already squared the ledger of the 0-2 start we get coming from the Repechage Rounds to be 2-2 with a +64 points diff. That means if any teams currently seeded from 16 down to us drops a game next week we'll jump above them and into playoff position and from there it's ours to lose.
The goal is to try and finish inside the top-20 in the seedings this season and give ourselves the best possible chance at getting through at least the first round.
Standing in our way right now are Puerto Rico (0-4), Ghana (0-4), Norway (3-1) and Lebanon (2-2). The last two of those are probably our biggest hurdles to a knock out stage, but if our awesome community of managers keep producing game shapes like they did this week we should be a great chance.
The primary goal is to make the knock out stage, the secondary to be the last Asian team standing to earn home court rights at the next Asian Cup. After that we dare to dream. There are some VERY big fish in this Consol Cup this year, but we won't die wondering.