Basketball: We’ve lost the fear factor says Fab

Nov 22 2009 by Mark Douglas, Sunday Sun

“To be honest, we’ve lost that air of dominance that we had in previous years – even at the Arena. We’re going to have to start clawing that back week by week.

“We’re going to have to start sending out a message again, game by game, that we’re still the dominant team in this league.

“We will play every team again and we have to get the word out again. I want the scouting reports to be going back to our opponents with the message: ‘Playing the Eagles, tough game – we’ll probably lose’.

“I think at the moment the message going back is something along the lines of ‘If you stay tough and hang in there, you can sneak the win and come from behind’. That bothers me and we’re going to have to do the hard work to make sure that changes.”

Flournoy believes that the secret to re-establishing themselves as the BBL’s team to beat is by going back to basics.

That is likely to mean more hard work on the training court this week as Flournoy hammers home the defensive principles that have served the Eagles so well in recent seasons.

“I think the major work is establishing our defence again and establishing our tempo,” he said.

“Defence was overly bad against Plymouth but we just didn’t capitalise on what we did in our defensive end.” At least the Eagles are nit-picking at victories now – a fortnight ago there were worries that there were fundamental problems with the roster that Flournoy had assembled, but there was no evidence of that on Friday night.

A further boost is the likely return of Flournoy to action. He is confident that he will be given the green light by his surgeon to resume training on Wednesday, with a view to getting some minutes against the improving Merseysiders.

“I have an X-ray on Monday and presuming that is OK, I should be able to start training again on Wednesday,” he said.