 |
| Photo courtesy of FIBA.com |
Now that is what you call a statement game.
Yesterday’s shock defeat left everyone wondering how Gilas
would react today. Sure, there were the expected “we’ll bounce back”
declarations, the avowing of ire-venting, but words are cheap and Gilas was
called upon to put up or shut up.
Well, they put them up and they never stopped punching until
the final siren sounded. By them, they had beaten the overmatched Hong Kong
team into submission and were gunning to hit the century mark, as an
exclamation point to their dominating performance.
Right from the get-go, the Filipinos wanted to erase the
bitterness left by yesterday’s defeat in their collective mouths by strangling
Hong Kong on both ends of the floor. They started the game off with a 12-0
blast and even led 20-2 before Hong Kong could gather themselves and try to
make a game out of it.
Andray Blatche was his usual self, hitting threes and
driving for finger rolls but this time, he wasn’t doing it alone. Jayson Castro,
after being told by Coach Baldwin to be more aggressive on offense, took
matters into his own hands and drove into the paint for lay ups and even
drained back-to-back threes in a span of thirty seconds.
Dondon Hontiveros also drained his own set of back-to-back
threes and before you knew it, we were up 51-22 at halftime.
The third quarter was more of the same, with Gilas rotating
their players to give more game burn to Intal, Ganuelas-Rosser, and Romeo. And
by the fourth, the only questions left were whether Gilas would hit the century
mark and if they’d be able to double their lead against Hong Kong. And the
answers to those questions are “yes” and “hell, yes”, with the final score set
at 101-50.
Follow
me at
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pmbalo
Twitter:
@PMVBalo
Instagram:
patrickmichaelbalo
No comments:
Post a Comment