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Game 1: Garreg Mach @ Agartha
These two teams met only a few days ago, in a down to the wire match in the Cathedral. There has been a lot of bad blood between the two teams despite the limited matches against each other.
Agartha started the game off aggressively, not giving the Knights of Seiros a chance to even breathe.
Now let’s talk about Kronya Von Ochs.
She has singlehandedly put Agartha in the middle of the playoff race in Northern Fodlan, scoring an MVP-like 28.3 points per game, with an additional 12.1 assists. And tonight, she went straight at the other MVP candidate, Rhea.
It’s not like Rhea would take something like that well, and she started to explode on offense:
The two would combine for 38 points in the 1st quarter alone, capped off by this idiotically insane 3 pointer by the Agarthan Assassin:
Flayn and Yuri Leclerc would get the last laugh in the quarter, however: Trading a steal with 6 seconds left for an easy layup.
Garreg Mach would lead, 33-31.
Alois would provide a catalyst immediately in the start of the 2nd quarter:
Garreg Mach would go on a 12-2 run before disaster struck:
It might not look like much, but Shamir’s right bicep was at minimum, strained by that contact. She stayed in the game, and didn’t look the same for the rest of the time.
Meanwhile, Kronya kept scoring, and now the rest of Agartha was helping out. Rhea did her best, but got in early foul trouble with this:
With that foul, Rhea went to the bench until the 3rd quarter, and Agartha clawed into the lead.
The half ended with Agartha up, 66-67.
At this point, I assumed that Garreg Mach would switch up their rotations. Rhea has 4 fouls and Shamir is obviously hurt. And so the coach did.
By replacing Catherine with Seteth?!
Agartha capitalized on the new rotation early in the 3rd:
When Catherine came back in, momentum was with the team from Shambala:
After a timeout, and behind by 10, Garreg Mach finally put in a new lineup: Flayn, Yuri, Manuela, Rhea, and Catherine.
It started chugging along nicely.
At the end of the 3rd, Garreg Mach had a solid lead, and went for a fancy alley-oop.
Seteth, you gotta try for those.
Agartha would hit a 3 at the end of the quarter to only make the lead 3, 99-96 Garreg Mach.
The game at this point was so good, that it’s almost a shame it had to end the way it did.
After playing competitive basketball for 7 quarters against Garreg Mach, Agartha could only hang on, barely keeping the deficit under double digits for most of the quarter. They finally started to get some momentum near the end:
Only for Garreg Mach to start a block party in the final minutes of the game:
And as the final flourish, KittyEmpress blocked a 3 point shot, forcing an inbounds pass with only 0.4 seconds on the shot clock. Which meant that someone had to catch a pass and shoot at the basket in under half a second:
If he had been 0.1 seconds quicker, that would’ve counted.
Garreg Mach comes out winning, 123-116, but the cost might be higher than they’d like to admit:
Shamir is now out for 4 weeks with a strained bicep, and with that, Garreg Mach loses their second best scoring option for a solid amount of time.