Fire keep chin up for big double at home
WITH a disappointing WNBL season coming to a close, the Townsville Fire have vowed to finish on a high.
The team have returned home after suffering losses in Adelaide and Perth last round but coach Shannon Seebohm said smiles had reappeared in the locker room.
“We had two tough losses and we can’t really blame them for feeling a bit down and out,” Seebohm said. “But practice has been really good this week, they’ve come back and we’ve had two good sessions.”
The Fire’s last two games for the 2019/20 campaign are at home and Seebohm wants his side to compete on every play.
“We’re not playing for finals, so we want to come out and put on the best performance we can for two games,” he said. “We owe it to the club, the girls owe it to their teammates, we owe it to the fans and the community who support the team to come out and keep fighting.
“We need to win on our home court … for teams coming up here it’s an advantage for us. So we need to start taking advantage of it.”
Despite languishing at seventh on the table, Seebohm said there’d been flashes of positives this year which would lay a good foundation for the future.
“We’ve shown in patches that we’re capable of playing at a really high level,” he said.
“Obviously we need to shoot the ball a lot better than what we did last weekend but I’m sure we will. We’ve had better results in the second half of the season after a couple of disastrous losses.
“Offensively I think we’ve found some things that worked for us so we can start ticking the scoreboard over a bit more at home.”
The assignment for the Fire this weekend is the secondplaced Melbourne Boomers, the side many believe will take out the championship.
Centre Darcee Garbin said the Fire weren’t afraid to get in the face of their more fancied opponents, who feature quality bigs Cayla George and Ezi Magbegor.
“We’re working on a few different things at training, just being really physical with them early ... not letting them get going early will be the key,” Seebohm said.