BENILDE is still holding out hope that somehow, some way, reigning back-to-back MVP Allen Liwag can still make it this NCAA Season 102 from his Achilles injury.
But Blazers coach Paolo Layug said that before players think of who's not in the lineup, they better focus on who's fighting alongside them from the past nine games.
"I don't know when, but it is what it is," he answered when asked by SPIN.ph about the timeline for Liwag. "But we can't just be waiting on him. We've got to focus on ourselves and get back to work."
Indeed, Liwag's presence was sorely missed in CSB's tough 83-72 defeat to Letran last Tuesday which dragged down the title hopeful to 6-3.
READ: Letran goes back-to-back with impressive blowout of St. Benilde
Not only did the the Blazers lose the rebounding battle, 38 to 31, but they were also easily outworked in almost every department by last year's runner-up.
And Layug was frank and brutal with his assessment.
"We were dumb and soft today, pretty much terrible," he said after the green-and-white dropped back-to-back games. "We just gotta work harder and we gotta play smarter."
Be better, Benilde
More pointedly, in the first-year mentor's eyes, this loss to the Titing Manalili-less Knights exposed Benilde by a lot.
"I think that was our worst game of the year, in my opinion," he stated. "Letran's a very good team and we didn't come out to match their intensity or level of play at all. They totally kicked our butts."
"I think anytime you come off a blowout loss like this, you should be concerned. So for me, it's really back to the drawing board that we got to get back to work."
And truth be told, Layug was of the mind that these defeats should trigger alarms for his wards, with their form a far cry from that squad which went 6-1 to start this campaign.
"I'd be worried if we continue to play this way. The last three halves have been terrible for us," he said, looking back not only at this loss to the Knights where they fell behind by as much as 24, but also to that setback against Emilio Aguinaldo College where they squandered a 19-point lead and was held to just 22 points in a second-half collapse.
"So it's gotta be a wake-up call for us that we got to get back to what we were doing before. Because we're not playing the way we were playing before."
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