Surprise Inclusions for Fire in Sydney Showdown

The Fire will face the Flames for a second time this season, today. Townsville triumphed by 19 points in the first encounter. It remains our women’s sole victory at home. They’ve excelled interstate and are eyeing a fourth away win from five games, this afternoon. Shooting guard Courtney Woods is optimistic about the Sydney showdown.

“Obviously we want to play our best basketball at home so that’s been tough, but I think it’ll be exciting to play in that huge arena and I think we’re ready to just put a good forty minutes of basketball together.”

The Fire will need to make more buckets, after inaccuracy proved costly last weekend. There wasn’t an extra emphasis on shooting at training this week, Woods and her teammates practiced plenty, in their own time however.

“Shannon put an emphasis on getting in the gym on your own. We don’t spend that much time at practice working on our individual skills, so that kind of falls back on the players themselves to work on their finishes, especially when we’re not performing as well as we want to be in games.”

Zitina Aokuso and Lauren Nicholson’s Opals omissions means they won’t miss any WNBL action this month. Townsville’s coach didn’t expect to have both players available throughout February, but Shannon Seebohm sees Australia’s loss as the Fire’s gain, given their importance to the team. He knows the visitors can’t just rely on their presence against Sydney though.

“We’ve had two losses in a row and we need to bounce back so I think it’s going to take a collective effort, everyone needs to be better.”

The hosts will be without their influential point guard Shyla Heal, who’ll be on international duty.

With successive games against  Sydney the Fire has an opportunity to put pressure on the top four teams by securing successive wins. Seebohm isn’t getting ahead of himself though.

“All we’re worrying about is beating the Flames in this next game to be totally honest we need to control what we can control, take it one game at a time and step up and play our best each week.”

Catch the game on kayo. Tip off is at 2.30pm.