Old basketball foes will collide tomorrow night at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall when Courts Pacesetters and Ravens basketball clubs clash in the finals of the Georgetown Amateur Basketball Federation (GABF) National Club Championships.
The longstanding rivalry between the two teams dates back years and will once again ignite when they take to the court in trying to outplay each other for the title of Guyana’s champion basketball club.
But more than a national title will be at stake as the coaches of both of the top seeded teams explained while speaking to Stabroek Sport via telephone yesterday.
Neither Ravens, highly touted and currently ranked under the Georgetown Amateur Basketball Association (GABA) as Georgetown’s number one team, nor Pacesetters, who occupy the number two position, will be taking the game lightly, according to their coaches.
“Pacesetters are coming to take care of business. I don’t have much to say. All of our talking will be done on the court,” said Pacesetters coach, Robert ‘Bobby’ Cadogan.
“The players are focused and know the task at hand because a lot of pride is at stake,” Cadogan added.
This is not the first time the Division One teams will be meeting in the finals of a major competition, but in recent times Pacesetters were on the losing end of their encounters with Ravens.
Pacesetters’ most recent loss at the hands of their rivals came in the finals of the GABA’s Pepsi Street Playoff Series when they went down 74-54 in the deciding Game Three of the best-of-three finals. Cadogan explained yesterday that prior to the recent losses, Pacesetters had come out on top of Ravens when they met in various tournaments and his team will be resorting to the game plan that led them to victory against Ravens in previous games.
“We [Pacesetters] use to beat Ravens prior to our last loss in the finals and the patterns that brought us success prior to that loss, that is what we will be using (in tomorrow’s finals),” Cadogan explained, but he was reluctant to reveal any of his team’s plans for tomorrow’s finals.
When asked how he plans to tackle Ravens’ defence and aggression that aided them to outplay their opponents in the fourth quarter of games in this tournament, Cadogan noted that the required level of fitness wasn’t there in the teams that Ravens met in this tournament but “Pacesetters are prepared to play the fourth quarter like it’s the first.”
In relation to Ravens’ defence, which is acclaimed as one of the best among clubs in Georgetown, Cadogan added: “I see nothing impressive about their [Ravens] defence, they just play hard. People may hear about it, but I don’t see it.”
Ravens Coach Darcel Harris, who has also experienced the rivalry first hand, having played for Ravens Division One team told Stabroek Sport yesterday that for tomorrow’s final Ravens will be implementing “hard defence as usual.”
“For this game we [Ravens] will be looking for good execution and discipline with the same intensity as the last finals,” said Harris.
Harris said further that despite defeating Pacesetters recently, “We are not taking them lightly, we will be delivering 110 percent.”
He added: “There’s nothing much new in the buildup of the Pacesetters team and any player they have on the inside, we have big men to match so I’m not really worried.”
The collision course for tomorrow’s finals saw both Ravens and Pacesetters breezing through the semi-final round of the tournament, but the final encounter wouldn’t be a breeze for either side and the debate over who is truly Georgetown’s number one team should end, at least temporarily.
