The Tall Ferns’ campaign at the FIBA Pre-Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Mexico is over after an 86-71 semi-final loss to Canada.<\/p>\n
New Zealand matched the North American-side early in Guadalajara, trailing by just three points at the end of the opening stanza.<\/p>\n
Despite the promising start, Canada found another gear in the second spell, building a 14-point lead by hafltime.<\/p>\n
That advantage ultimately proved too much to overcome.<\/p>\n
Captain Tayla Dalton said despite the loss, the tournament had reinforced the belief that New Zealand can compete at the highest level.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to win games, we’re going to be really tough competitors, and I think this group of ten, and our coaching staff are hungry for it,” Dalton said.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to go away and work our individual game, our team game, so that when the next tournament comes, we’re aiming for the final.”<\/p>\n
Canada 86 (Gibb 17p, Swords 17p, Bascoe 15p) defeat 2degrees Tall Ferns 71 (L. Whittaker 21p, Tofaeono 18p, Shearer 12p)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tall Ferns’ campaign at the FIBA Pre-Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Mexico is over after an 86-71 semi-final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-577564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}