Worcester Wolves v Durham Wildcats preview
BBL Championship – Saturday 12 November 2011
Worcester University (19:00)
Worcester Wolves and Durham Wildcats will both be looking for their second BBL Championship victory of the season when they meet at Worcester University on Saturday evening.
The Wolves opened their BBL Championship season with a win at Glasgow Rocks, while Durham recorded their first win since stepping up to the top flight with a narrow victory against Cheshire Jets last week.
Wolves are also in action at Mersey Tigers on Friday night, and coach Paul James expects a tough game: “Like Tigers they also will be a well organised and a very patient team offensively. They have got their first win now and will be coming down to Worcester with a lot of confidence. I think the key to them is playing as a team and having everybody contribute.”
Wolves go into the weekend on the back of a pair of victories against Guildford Heat, and James in pleased with how his team are progressing: “We have been steadily getting better as a team as we get to know each other a little more. It’s tough beating a team three times in such a short space of time. But we want to keep improving as a team so it was easy for us to keep our focus on what we needed to do even if we did not always stick to the game plan. In the last game both Arnas Kazlauskas and Alex Zimnickas really stepped up to help us win that game.”
The Wildcats will go into the game with a spring in their step as they withstood a furious comeback from the Jets to record a thrilling 74-72 victory against Cheshire, on Saturday.
Coach Dave Elderkin was a happy man after the game: “Well obviously it was very welcome win for us. We were six games in with four Trophy games and a Cup match and we’d drawn blanks in all of them.
“I thought we deserved it over the 40 minutes even though they had a good go at us in the second half. It was a good team effort, and I thought the second quarter was the best we’d played this season as we held them to five points. At half-time we talked about not being complacent, but we came out and played complacently with soft defence and slow offence and we let them make a real game of it.”
Coach Elderkin is hoping that win can be a springboard for success: “We’re looking to build on it. We had practice on Sunday so that or minds were still fresh from the previous day’s game and we needed to iron out a few wrinkles because they worked really hard to take us out of our offence in the third period. We got an early look at the game tapes, and that will be important when we play Worcester.
“I don’t know much about them, but they’ve got a couple of players left from last year and I know Paul James – so once again it’ll be a case of working on our game. We did play their university side in BUCS recently, and it was an interesting game as we won by 33! But it was on the day they played at Guildford Heat in the BBL Trophy, so I think all their BBL players who eligible for BUCS were there. I like the fact that we’ve got a 33 point lead, but that will have no bearing on Saturday.”
