By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
There’s nothing worse than finishing fourth in a major tournament and that happened in the Rio Olympics for Australia.
“Losing the (Third Place Game) sucked. But we’ve never been that close, in years. Now it’s about putting it all together,” said Joe Ingles to FIBA, while entering another summer with the national team. “It’s going to be exciting. We’ll have a lot of support there, and hopefully, we can be the first team to bring a medal back to Australia.”
So can the Boomers get a medal? “With the team that we’ve got – that we will have – we’re going to be confident. We believe. Even the last couple of tournaments we’ve been to, we were right there. For me and our team, when we play for our country, we take tremendous pride in that. We’re not representing one person, we are representing 23 million people or whatever we got in Australia right now. We know that everyone there is watching us, either at the game or at home, and you can feel it.”
Australia will play against Canada, Senegal, and Lithuania in Group H. It’s by far the strongest first phase group and only two teams will make it to the second round. Ingles and Australia are up for the task: “Competing for Australia is why I started playing the game. Growing up, I wanted to represent Australia. That was all I wanted to do. The NBA, and even playing professionally in Australia seemed so far at the time. Watching Australia at the Olympics and the World Cups was what I watched, what we got to see in Australia. The first time putting on that jersey was special. Wearing the colors, the name…it’s just something that you can’t get anywhere else. I love playing the NBA, I loved playing in Europe, but putting on the colors and the name on the jersey, there’s just really nothing that compares to that.”