Fire should heed a hissed Taipan
TweetTOWNSVILLE has been the WNBL team of the season but does that guarantee the Fire's first Championship tomorrow?
Absolutely not.
All it has guaranteed is the home-town, home crowd bliss of playing the decider at a sold-out Townsville RSL Stadium.
In its threepeat quest, Bendigo is massive threat tomorrow and comes in with outside expectations low.
For the Fire, a city is hanging on the outcome and that can be a sizeable burden to pile into the pre-game backpack and carry around for 40 minutes.
Don't think that it has never happened before. It happens regularly.
Hell, you could argue it happened as recently as last night in Cairns where the red-hot favourite Taipans were sufficiently overcome by the occasion to give New Zealand a head-start toward its 1-0 NBL Grand Final Series lead.
Do you think the Taipans weren't fired up for the occasion?
Of course they were, and that load of expectation and emotion can be an enormous dead weight to lug about. You can feel as though you are running in mud even though physically, you should be ripe and ready.
A fortnight ago in the WNBL semi final, Townsville shrugged off two years of travelling down to Bendigo to ultimately face the ignominy of applauding as the Spirit players walked up to collect their Championship.
This time, the decider would be in Townsville.
The city has gone crazy and it would be so easy for the Fire to be swept up and set ablaze by all the attention.
That extra adrenalin can make players believe they MUST be brilliant and impose a set of expectations on themselves that become unrealistic, unattainable and, in the end, their undoing.
You no doubt have seen young players gamble twice on defensive plays they'd never try in a regular game, only to find themselves on two quick fouls and benched within minutes of the tip-off, immediately altering the course of the contest.
And not the way they wanted.
Young players?
There have been veterans who have fallen into the trap too.
Multiple MVPs have been caught up in the belief they HAVE to be special on that special day/night, only to be awful instead, every error magnified, every frailty and doubt brutally exposed.
That is the danger facing Townsville tomorrow after successive Grand Final defeats to Bendigo.
Where once it was travelling and playing in a hostile environment against a seasoned winner, this time the pitfall is finding the balance between efficiently and ruthlessly executing the roles necessary for success and simply trying too hard.
If coach Chris Lucas and his staff can get the Fire aggressively focusing on the process, unfettered by expectation and raucous support but instead lifted and fulfilled by it, Townsville can complete this season's destiny and become the first team to bring a national basketball crown to the far north of Queensland.
Or it can think too long about doing just that and find itself, like Cairns last night, wondering how it went so horribly wrong.
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