GB women thrashed again but Peel takes positives

 By Chris Cottrell, Sportsbeat, in Manchester

GREAT Britain's women's wheelchair basketball coach Garry Peel insists all is not lost despite another crushing defeat saw his charges finish fourth at the BT Paralympic World Cup.

Peel's side were on the wrong end of a 59-24 defeat to Australia, their second consecutive emphatic loss to the Beijing 2008 bronze medallists and their fourth in four matches in Manchester.

Great Britain did hold the lead at 6-5 after the first quarter but Australia turned up the heat in the subsequent three periods and with Cobi Crispin and Liesel Tesch notching 14 and 12 points respectively, they eased to World Cup bronze.

Both Laurie Williams and Louise Sugden joint top-scored for Great Britain with five points apiece but, while the hosts were no match for their opponents on Sunday, Peel still believes there is reason to smile.

"Today's match was a learning experience, we were still aiming to win and what we have learnt today is that we have not played our best," he said. 

"We've got a young team here and the young players were very nervous but so were some of the more experience players so we have go to work on that.

"Overall it was a good week, we stamped our authority in the beginning of that game against Australia and the girls don't want to lose but we did make some mistakes and at the end we just couldn't score, we kept turning the ball over.

"We love coming to the BT Paralympic World Cup, it's a great warm up for competition and it's briilliant for the girls to have games to play. 

"This will be a stepping stone towards the Worlds and a stepping stone towards London, we've just got to get better at playing on home turf."

Meanwhile, in the gold medal match, Canada came from behind to notch up an impressive 62-46 victory over the Netherlands with Janet McLachlan again excelling with a haul of 26 points.