A horror second half has seen the Just Better Care Wollongong Roller Hawks fall short in their bid to unseat the Darwin Salties as the National Wheelchair Basketball League champions.
Going in as underdogs, the Roller Hawks got off to a fast start but their 14-8 advantage midway through the opening quarter quickly evaporated as the Salties closed out the period on a 9-0 run.
Back-to-back three pointers from TomO’Neill-Thorne to start the second quarter had the Darwin team up and about but the Roller Hawks steadied and were within three at halftime.
The Salties ramped up the intensity and came out swinging at the start of the third, with Tom O’Neill-Thorne scoring 8 straight points including two more back-to-back threes that stretched the lead to double digits.
Wollongong were unable to recover, managing just 4 points in the opening 5 minutes of the period as the Salties turned turnovers and missed shots by the Roller Hawks into easy fastbreak opportunities.
“Darwin was phenomenal in the second half,” said Roller Hawks captain Tristan Knowles.
“We executed our game really, really nicely in the first and second quarters to find ourselves very much in the game. The second half was a completely different tale in so many areas. We were outplayed.”
Trailing by 17 going into the final quarter, the Roller Hawks faithful had faint hope of a comeback similar to last year’s grand final when the Roller Hawks trailed by 12 at three quarter time before charging back to bring the game down to the wire but there was no stopping the Darwin express.
A 10-0 run to start the fourth quarter saw the Salties lead balloon to 27 with Head Coach Brett Stibners subbing out his stars and letting the bench play out the final minutes as the Salties went back-to-back with a 81-50 win.
“I think we went a little bit hesitant in a way and you don’t get to do that against a team like Darwin. You’ve really got to take the game on and back yourself and back the strategy which I don’t think we did a very good job of. Darwin did the complete opposite.”
“We’ll go back and look at the video and work out where things went wrong.”
After the game Knowles paid tribute to his team and the work that went into their Finals charge.
“I don’t question anyone’s effort. I think we all went for the full 40 minutes. Luke Pople stood out in so many stages across the weekend and particularly against Perth (in the Preliminary Final) and you can’t go past Hannah Dodd who played six games across the weekend, played in both the men’s and women’s leagues and played near 40 minutes in all six of her games so she’s an absolute trooper. We’re very lucky to have her services.”
The Roller Hawks will have to spend another off-season thinking about how to overcome Darwin.
“It’s critically important that we don’t throw the towel in and go back to the drawing board.”
“I think we’ve got the group of players that we need to experience success so given that’s our first year with two new players into our starting five in Jontee Brown and Tomas Klein and really a massive pleasure to have Colin Smith back in the fold as well.
“We’ll learn from the losses we had to Darwin across this weekend and come back next year bigger and better.”
The Roller Hawks also went down in the Grand Final of the 3X3 division on Saturday. The Roller Hawks defeated Perth in overtime in the semi final 10-8 to get to the decider against Manly but the homeside was far too dominant, defeating the Roller Hawks 15-6.