Basketball: Titans demolish Tall Blacks in warm-up

BRISBANE - The New Zealand men's team suffered a serious dent to their confidence with a 66-92 loss to the Victoria Titans in Melbourne yesterday.

Following Wednesday's 81-69 win over another Australian national league club, the Melbourne Tigers, yesterday's result has reminded coach Tab Baldwin and the Tall Blacks of the amount of work to do ahead of their Goodwill Games campaign starting in Brisbane on Monday.

The same standard of performance in their final warm-up match, against the United States Games team tomorrow, could result in an embarrassing scoreline.

"We did not play well, there are a lot of lessons to be learned," Baldwin said. "Our execution let us down badly and we lost a bit of confidence in the systems we are trying to run, which only made the hole deeper for ourselves."

The Tall Blacks improved in the closing stages and lost the second half only 38-41, but they never recovered from the early foul trouble problems for key forward Tony Rampton.

The Cairns-based Rampton was easily New Zealand's best, when he was on court, scoring 16 points and pulling down nine rebounds. Guard Phill Jones was next best scorer with 12.

The Tall Blacks were again without lively guard Mark Dickel, a Titans player in the Australian league, who has a knee injury.

- NZPA