You fans sure get your money's worth at The Triangle. Two games, two cliffhangers and, I believe, it should have been two wins as well last weekend.

At least we got a good victory over Birmingham. Yes, I know the Bullets are near the foot of the table but they are not nearly as bad as their record indicates. If they were, they would not have won that many games in Europe.

Rico Alderson made a welcome return in that game but my captain Randy Duck sat out almost the entire second half with a groin injury. We have now got a big challenge to get Randy healthy for... well, for when? Do we get him right for the cup final and not worry about the league game at London Towers on Saturday or do we rush him back for that?

I gave the players three days off this week because they were tired but they will be okay. There is nothing like three days off your legs to get your bounce back in them and we need that. We need Wil Johnson and Sterling Davis to bounce back and Rico needs to get in shape.

He had to come out of the game two or three times last Sunday and I told him he needs to run a little bit and do some shooting work because his touch was a little astray. He came good at the end though with that dunk. Wow! That was a hell of a play to win a game on.

Rico did not have any fun when he missed those three games. You could see him sitting there miserable on the bench. He wants to make a contribution and I think he tried to make too big a contribution offensively on Sunday but that was a big play he came up with at the end.

As for our overtime defeat by Towers on Saturday, I think we missed a golden opportunity. They have lots of problems and we had a nice run and got up by eight or nine but I hate it when we give it right back like that. We pour in 27 minutes of hard work to build a lead and then we give it right back and we're in a dogfight I thought at that point we were clearly playing better and we were going to escape them. They didn't have any rhythm going but we let them hang on in there. We should have put them away in regulation time. Instead we were fortunate to get into overtime and then we did a really poor job. We should have won that game by ten points in overtime.

There are lots of stats about overtime games. The only one I know is that the team who scores first wins 65 per cent of the time. Well, we managed to bring that average down I'm afraid.

When you get timeouts like that one we had with ten seconds to go in regulation you always try and construct something tactical but it doesn't always work out. Against Towers, the play was supposed to be to go to Sterl and let him do his jab step and rock and shoot but Randy came up and went right and flipped it to Mike Brown who hit the shot.

That was okay. In fact, there were numerous times on Sunday where the plays I had drawn on the board came off. That has not been happening too often. We hit Ralph Blalock with some backdoor passes and we had a couple of cute out of bounds plays to get a quick shot.

We are not playing near our potential right now. We are hurt and we are not shooting the ball very well but we are 11-and-3 in the league and we are in the cup final and it will come back. We will put an impressive string of victories together, I am sure. We need to because, with Towers away this weekend and the cup final on the 12th, this is crunch time right here.

GO BEARS