June 30 2022

Being a Melbourne Tigers fan can be stressful this year as the Tigers Men have been in several close battles this year.

Last night (yep Wednesday!) I was flicking through Facebook and there was news about the Womens team losing to Ringwood and thought it must be a delayed news report so I checked the NBL1 site and sure enough the Tigers were playing on a Wednesday!

So when I tuned in, the Tigers Men had the game against Ringwood well in hand halfway through the third and then the wheels just fell off and suddenly Ringwood were just two behind as Melbourne couldn’t get a shot to go in while Ringwood got them in up the other end of the court especially when they scored near the buzzer via a turnover.

The last term was an arm wrestle and the last minute was complete drama and I don’t know if NBL1 has terrible streaming quality but I couldn’t maintain a connection on the stream and it made things really tense.

So Melbourne were up by five with seconds to go when Ringwood got a late three to bring it back down to two points and so Melbourne used a timeout to start play up the court and chew up the clock to ice the game as they could still lose the game if a turnover resulted in a three or worse a 2 plus one opportunity.

Unfortunately they held on to the ball for too long as play commenced and the ball was turned over in controversial circumstances as it appears the whistle was blown a fraction early as the ball was being thrown in.

The stream got jammed and so I had to read the play by play to find out what on earth is going on over at Ringwood and it was a nervous couple of minutes as I knew Ringwood were in attack and could make a winning play.

Finally after a couple of minutes, the scoreboard updated and Ringwood were unable to score and the Tigers held on to win a close one 77 to 75.

The Tigers improve their season record to 3-9 and while that sounds bad, it is not a true reflection of the Mens abilities as they lost to Casey by 5, Sandringham by 5, Keilor by 4, NW Tasmania by 7 and Kilsyth by 4, a bit of luck the other way and the Tigers could have been 8-4 and be 7th on the ladder instead of 16th.

The Women are currently sixteenth too with a 2-10 record at the moment and it has not been a great season for the young side but they are still finding out who they are as a team and hopefully they can beat Dandenong and move up to ladder, the interesting part is that while they have scored less points than every team in the league, they are pretty good defensively as they are up among the league leaders when it comes to giving away measly totals.

As usual I look forward to the next round either by watching the stream or just follow the online scoreboard as one does when living in QLD.

Go Tigers!