1687 people had paid admission. And there was a ghost game atmosphere. At least in the first 60 seconds after the jump ball. The fan clubs of the Bundesliga basketball team s.Oliver Würzburg and the handful of ratiopharm Ulm supporters who had traveled there had agreed to remain silent for the first minute in memory of the people in the Ukraine. And the rest of the hall did the same.
Of course, holding up banners condemning war and calling for unity doesn’t help the victims of war – and even in the totally irrational event that a lunatic warmonger like Putin should see something like that, it certainly won’t stop him from continuing to kill allow. But that’s always the case when you want to set a symbolic sign of solidarity. The well-intentioned will and the sympathetic gesture count, as with demonstrations, of course.
When the music box jumped from 0:59 to 1:00, the people in the grandstand jumped out of their seats. They clapped their hands sore and almost screamed their lungs out. And the drums of the fan clubs pounded. basketball atmosphere. Even if the hall was only half full (3140 fit in, only 2355 would have been allowed anyway due to Corona). Until the beginning of the final quarter, the support carried the baskets in the direction of a surprise against the favored Swabians.
Up to the decisive phase of the game that ended up being lost 76:88. Up to seven minutes before the end of the game, the Würzburg supporters seemed to have exhausted themselves: Just at the time when the Baskets obviously needed the support most, it became more and more quiet in the hall during Ulm’s victorious 14-0 run. It is of course too easy to attribute this to the illness-related absence of the hall announcer, who usually babbles almost to the point of tearing his vocal cords while constantly asking the audience. Even if he has definitely helped the Baskets win close games in recent years with his ear-bleeding screams.
On Friday, however, that probably wouldn’t have helped either. The guests, just when it mattered, were just too tough as a team and too good individually. So what is left for the Baskets after the upward trend before the international break with two surprise wins against Bamberg and Bonn and hope-inspiring performances in Hamburg and Ulm, now, after the 17th loss of the season in the 22nd game?
You can be very happy that Oldenburg lost significantly in Hamburg at the weekend (which is why the Baskets slipped back to 16th place) and that the last Gießen went down against Ludwigsburg. Heidelberg, a competitor in the relegation battle with seven wins, is currently free of play due to a corona outbreak, which is why Frankfurt (five wins) was also unable to go ahead. The MBC, however, won surprisingly well against Bayreuth and now has seven wins to their credit, two more than the Baskets have. Nevertheless: In the end almost everything is the same, so to speak, only that one more game day has passed without moving forward.
The baskets have twelve games left in the next eight weeks to get the five or even six wins that are probably necessary to stay up. After the guest appearance of former Würzburg crowd favorite Maurice Stuckey and his current play-off team Crailsheim next Saturday (8:30 p.m.), the game will then be really about the sausage twice within four days: in Frankfurt (16.3., 7 p.m.) and against Heidelberg (19.3 ., 8.30 p.m.).
Groundbreaking days for the basketball Bundesliga location Würzburg.
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