Brest 2

Brest 2 have no long-standing feud to point to. What the team has instead is a building. The Victoria Centre, the Brest regional base for the Olympic reserve in team sports, took three years to build, from 2003 to 2006. It carries the name of Anatoly Petrovich Meshkov, and its main court holds 3,740 spectators.

That is a large hall for a side in the second tier of Belarusian basketball. The Belarusian Higher League is where Brest 2 play, and the fixtures put them against teams built in the same way. Borisfen 2 is one of them, another club whose name carries a numeral. In a league of this kind the second team of a city club plays for minutes and match experience as much as for the table.

The hall was built as a sports school, and the team's own set-up fits that. There is no separate club identity: no nickname, no colours of its own. The players use the centre's court, and the "2" in the name ties them to something larger.

That something is BC Brest, the city's senior basketball club, founded around 1998. The numeral is the only mark of where Brest 2 come from.