An­drew Gioan­net­ti

Af­ter los­ing on Sat­ur­day night to see the se­ries tied 1-1, Knock­out cham­pi­on San­do Petro Jazz re­cov­ered to thrash De­fence Force 94-83, to take a 2-1 ad­van­tage in the fi­nal of the Mack­e­son Su­per 10 Bas­ket­ball League Big-Four, on Sun­day at the Jean Pierre Com­plex, Mu­cu­rapo. Again na­tion­al for­ward Steven "Lighter" Lewis was at his best, net­ting an out­stand­ing 35 points and 13 re­bounds, but for the sec­ond time in the se­ries, his shoot­ing prowess could not hand his team, De­fence Force the win­ning edge.

Jazz, how­ev­er, had all of its play­ers in the scor­ing mix, with five tak­ing dou­ble-dig­its scores led by Ako Pas­call. Pas­call fin­ished on 23 points, fol­lowed by cen­tre Dex­troy Man­swell, who net­ted 20 and grabbed 15 re­bounds. Wil­fred Ben­jamin sank 17 points with as many re­bounds, while both guards Richard Guisep­pi and Sadi­ki Guer­ra had a hand with 11 points each.

The army/coast­guard com­bi­na­tion unit start­ed well and looked on course to take a sec­ond win in as many match­es. The team led by a slight 46-44 mar­gin at the half time in­ter­val but did fell con­sid­er­ably in the third to trail 67-59. Jazz re­gained form from the said pe­ri­od and went on to con­trol the match and the out­come which was rem­i­nis­cent of a very suc­cess­ful sea­son for the South-based team. De­fence Force's top play­ers "Lighter" al­so took 13 re­bounds in his ef­fort while his team­mate Wilt Vin­cent added 11 points and pulled down nine re­bounds. In­ter­est­ing­ly, Lewis has scored an in­cred­i­ble to­tal of 104 points in the last three match­es for De­fence Force. Jazz won the first match of the best-in-sev­en se­ries 83-74, be­fore De­fence Force, four-time cham­pi­on of the com­pe­ti­tion, re­cov­ered for a 87-78 win on Sat­ur­day. The fourth match will be played tonight at the same venue from 8 o'clock.