The Cairns Taipans had a shocker on Friday night against the Wollongong Hawks but it’s far from panic stations yet.

An entire season in any sport or code seldom runs to plan without the odd hiccup and it’s no exception for our Snakes.

It was a great effort defensively by the boys as they held the potent ‘Gong’ to 68 points and it would have been part of coach Fearney’s game plan to keep them under 70.

However, we only managed to score 58 ourselves which is a disastrous result! In the off season the Taipans wanted to solve our scoring issues by adding some ‘instant offense’ to the line up so they chased and signed scoring machine Cam Tragardh.

Now the harsh reality is ‘Trigger’ still got his 20 points which means nine other Taipans only managed a combined tally of 38 points.

I’m betting Fearney has the squad doing some shooting practise this week in the lead up to their game against the Kings in Sydney on Friday night.

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Andrew Gaze has come out and told the media Cairns can’t win it all this season because they are too small. We lost the rebound count this round 42–36 so maybe ‘Drewy’ has a point.

We all know his knowledge of basketball is as good as anyone’s, however, I think it’s too early to tell. If the Kings give us a touch up on Friday night (which they won’t) and we get smashed on the boards then Fearney might need to think about biting the bullet and adding an extra big.

In hindsight it may be a shame Ian Crosswhite didn’t hang around for one more year in the Tropics.

Train hard, fix the problems and go get a win against Hammer's men in the Harbour City....Problem solved!

In other results the Melbourne Tigers remain winless after an off season of turmoil and change as the Kings kicked their tails. Defending champs NZ opened up a can of whoop ass against the supposed much improved 36ers, and Perth were too good for the Crocs who have talent now but need to mesh.

For all the punters out there this is how I see Round 3 taking shape;

Fri – Townsville vs NZ (NZ by 5)
Fri – Sydney vs Cairns (Cairns by 10)
Sat – Adelaide vs Cairns (Adelaide by 4)
Sun - Melbourne vs Perth (Perth by 22)
Sun – Wollongong vs Townsville (Gong by 12)