By Mike Rowbottom at the Manchester Regional Arena

Michael Barker_May_26May 25 - Crucial victories earned Britain's men's footballers and wheelchair basketball players places in tomorrow's finals at the BT Paralympic World Cup in Manchester.


A 7-3 win over the Republic of Ireland secured the GB Paralympic football team a meeting with Brazil, while a 59-50 win over Japan saw the basketball players into their final against the United States, who maintained their unbeaten record with a 64-59 win over Germany.

Brazil finished their round robin matches unbeaten with a 10-0 win over the US today in the seven-a-side format adapted for athletes with cerebral palsy.

Michael Barker (pictured above, front) and Ibrahima Diallo (pictured below, left) both scored hat-tricks against the Republic of Ireland and team captain Matt Dimbylow's second half strike completed the rout.

Now GB will seek to reverse the 4-2 loss they suffered in their opening match against the team who finished fourth at the Beijing Paralympics.

Barker said: "That was a great game, I'm so happy we won and a hat-trick for me, so I was really chuffed.

"Tomorrow we want gold and I won't be happy with anything less, so we will have to play our best game.

"I love the competition here and it's a great build up ahead of London."

Diallo added: "We all work really hard as a team and we've got a great buzz around the guys, so we're feeling very confident at the moment.

Ibrahima Diallo_May_26
"Hopefully we can play how we want to tomorrow and to come away from here with the win which would be absolutely amazing."

Brazil will line up in the final unbeaten after beating the United States 10-0 in their final round robin match.

Hat-tricks a piece from Jose Guimaraes and Fabio Bordignon, a double from Jan Costa and strikes from Ronaldo Souza and Yurig Ribeiro were Brazil's reward for some outstanding attacking.

The basketball team prevailed with huge assistance from Simon Munn and Ian Sagar, who scored 20 and 19 respectively.

GB's Abdi Jama said: "It was an average game for us, but we showed great spirit, the bulldog spirit in the way we came back.

"I don't know what's happened to our shooting this tournament, we were playing in Germany last week and it was a different story.

"We beat Japan there by over 20 points.

"Fortunately our shooting just turned a corner in the second half and we pulled it back.

"We are looking forward to playing the USA again, we need to come back from that defeat."

The Great Britain women's wheelchair basketball team went down narrowly 42-52 to Germany in a match that could have swung either way.

The result means the women have lost all three of their matches and will be playing for the bronze medal tomorrow.

Gesche Schunemann_May_26
Gesche Schunemann (pictured above, number 10 shirt) again topped the scoring with 20 points, with the impressive Helen Freeman topping the score charts for Great Britain with 11.

Despite the loss, Freeman was understandably very proud of her team's efforts and says this experience could prove to be invaluable come the Paralympics in London, which are now just 96 days away.

Freeman said: "It was definitely our best game so far, we have got potential to improve.

"We are playing against the best teams in the world and so it's fantastic practise for us leading into the summer.

"We can learn a lot from this tournament and from these games and work on our weakness's going towards London.

"We have been trying out a lot of different line ups and so everyone has got to play against these great teams."

Britain's opponents, and the other finalist, will be decided by the result of the USA and Australia match.

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