Ouch. Australia‘s Olympic dream of scoring a medal in the men’s basketball cratered hard this morning, after the Boomers suffered a last-minute loss against Spain in the bronze medal game.
The score was 88-87 with Australia in lead, but in the last ten seconds a foul from Patty Mills – a questionable foul, imo, but we’ll play nice – gave Spanish player Sergio Rodriguez an easy two buckets. Australia couldn’t claw back, and we lost 88-89. Dark days.
It looked like this could be our very first medal in the men’s basketball, and we’ve been searching for it for a long time. We also landed fourth place in 1988, 1996 and 2000.
Typically outspoken Andrew Bogut reckons some of the calls were well off. “Absolutely ridiculous,” was the terminology he used, actually. “We battled tonight but at times we were outnumbered out on the court,” he said. “It felt like we were playing a different sport at times.”
Mills, for his part, was more diplomatic. “It’s part of the game,” he said. “Calls go your way sometimes and sometimes they don’t. Today they didn’t and you live with it. There were other opportunities throughout the game — we made some of those opportunities and others we didn’t.”
Lads, we’ll see you in Tokyo.
Photo: Getty Images.
