By Rachael Bland

This is the goal. You want to be competing in these big moments as a player. At the start of the year, we said we wanted to be competing against the best, and we’ve put in the performances where it has counted to be here today, and hopefully we can inspire a community back home in Newcastle with our performance.

We know we have the talent to compete at the top, but we also know where the work is for us to do and that is to develop that chemistry and gel so that we can best express ourselves on the floor on any given day.

We’ve had some real battles and there have been games where we should have won but we’ve slipped up, and vice-versa, but it is great for the spectators because nobody can predict results in this league as we’re all competing at such a high level and any team really can win on any given day.

We showed in the semi-finals that when we gel, we can beat anybody, because that was such a tough game where our togetherness and chemistry really brought the best out of us late in the game to get the win, and there is no reason why we can’t compete with anybody out there, including London.

The Lions are doing phenomenal things. We know that we are very much underdogs, but we want to be in a position to make a run at the win in the fourth quarter, so if we can muster up that feeling of the last two minutes of the semi-final then it could be a really positive outcome for us.

You can’t bring anything but your A-game against London – they punish every single mistake you make and they’re a relentless force who keep on making you pay for any errors, so we know we can’t afford to not be at our best and that we must perform for the full 40 minutes.

The Lions have had phenomenal success and we should be celebrating that as a basketball community. They’re leading the way in the hope that other teams follow suit, and hopefully it can happen and the investment comes in across the country. They’re flying the flag for our league in Europe, I’m excited to support them there, and hopefully it can only benefit the WBBL overall.

As for ourselves, we all know that over 40 minutes we haven’t seen the best of our team yet. We see spurts of brilliance, and we’ve had some pretty good performances, but we’ll do our best to put a full game together in the final and make Newcastle proud.