DEFENDING BERGER Paints Super League netball champions Jamalco are a step away from winning a magical four in a row this afternoon after dealing a severe blow to the hopes of Tivoli Gardens in the first game of their best-of-three final at the Leila Robinson Courts on Friday.

Today's second game, set to begin after a third and fourth placed play-off between Waulgrovians 'A' and Tivoli 'B' at 4:00, will be racked with tension as the frustrations from a closely fought 51-48 result all but brought the teams to blows.

As was expected, the small battles in the different areas of the court were in evidence on Friday, but eventually the prowess of Nadine Bryan at centre and Meisha Reid at wing attack won the game for Jamalco.

PHYSICAL FITNESS

What was interesting though was the physical fitness of Jamalco, who played some crushing defence throughout the game and still had the speed and strength to get the ball down the court on offence.

A big part of that was the ability of Reid and Bryan to play long searching lobs to 6' 4" tall Romelda Aiken at goal shoot.

The long reach of Aiken resulted in her managing to get 50 attempts, from which she downed 43 goals.

Cleopatra Grant, at the other end of the court, dominated Nicole Aiken as she shot 44 goals from 52 attempts. To be fair to Nicole Aiken though, she did make interceptions at points in the game that proved invaluable to Jamalco's charge towards a fourth consecutive title.

Tivoli can take heart from the fact that while they lost to a strong Jamalco unit, the game could have been different had they taken care of the ball in the mid-court a little better and not had so many turn-overs.

To accentuate the point, at the end of the third quarter Tivoli trailed by four points at 38-34 but lost the plot and went down by as much as 10 before scoring six unanswered points to bring the game back to a manageable situation.

DROPPED BALLS

A couple of dropped balls from Peter-Gaye Thomas, Kasey Evering and Shedeiky Hamilton then meant that Jamalco were able to get back to a six-point lead that would prove too much to overhaul.

According to losing coach, Sylvester Campbell, those problems can be fixed and so Jamalco will have more trouble when they play today.

"Today we were a little hilly. We lost some balls in the centre circle but it's nothing that we can't fix," he said.

"Come Sunday we have to fix the mid-court and stop the balls from coming over to Aiken," Campbell said.

Jamalco's coach, Winston Nevers. also said his team had more tricks up its sleeve and said that the loss to Tivoli in the preliminary round was the wake-up call his team needed to get back to its best.

"That loss was the wake-up call. We definitely want to close it out come Sunday," he said.

"We have a bench with Elaine Davis who is ready to go again, so we have a lot of tricks left to come."