Young guns show late fight but Preston too strong

Tameside 2 are a very young and dangerous team who have already beaten us once this season in the cup and took us close in the home fixture. They were certainly a team capable of halting our excellent run, especially on a poor court in Dukinfield that they were more used to. The squad took a last minute hit too with Harry and Theo having to drop out at short notice.

It was going to take more than that to knock us off course however. We started big, with Andy, Pauli and Nathaniel starting together for the first time and they immediately took away Tameside's size and athleticism threat inside. The first three quarters were an outstanding example of how this team wants to control a game. It was built on strong defence with every inside shot heavily contested and often disrupted. Tameside had no way of getting any rhythm and Preston weren't giving up possession cheaply allowing them no way in on transition. We played with real speed, but also ran set plays to perfection time after time to take advantage of their inexperience and find our shooters. Diddy had a particularly fruitful night with 6 made threes, and all of it was underpinned by Andy putting in a huge workload, controlling the boards and both he and Lincoln dictating the offense in style with 10 assists a-piece.

Having held them to only 30 points in 3 quarters and us 30 ahead on 60, we just needed to continue to do what we were doing to take a very impressive win. However, they began to take shots from three like they hadn't done all game and they came out in the fourth shooting it pure. We'd forced them into it through our interior defence, but it took a moment to adjust. Not everyone managed to show cool heads under this bombardment and we compounded it by not looking after the ball like we had done for the first thirty minutes. We were calmed by some big scores soon enough (but not before they'd pulled it to within single-digits), with our experience finally winning through and the last five-minutes were outstanding as we began to build our buffer again and eventually win by a comfortable 20 points.

Top scorers: Diddy 18, Ewan 13, Pauli, Tom Cookson and Nathaniel 9, Andy and Lincoln 8
Rebounds: Andy 18, Pauli 8, Linc 5
Assists: Andy and Lincoln 10, Ewan 8, Pauli 5
Steals: Pauli and Diddy 4
Blocks: Andy 4, Tom C 3