Cape Town Tigers coach says team wants to reach BAL final

Cape Town Tigers’ head coach Florsheim Ngwenya has high expectations as his side head into the fourth edition of the Basketball African League that stats in Pretoria on Saturday.

“If you ask me what my wish list is, I want to make it as far as I can. In fact, I want to be in the final,” he said.

Two-time BAL quarterfinalists and 2023 BNL (SA domestic league) champions Cape Town Tigers are grouped in the Kalahari Conference with four-time participants Petro de Luanda (Angola) and newcomers Dynamo (Burundi) and FUS Rabat (Morocco).

They play the first of their six Conference games against first time qualifiers Dynamo at the SunBet Arena at 7pm.

The Tigers are not unfamiliar with Burundians having beaten them 76-61 in the BAL qualifying tournament organised by FIBA (International Basketball Federation) Africa last November in Johannesburg. 

Despite that result, Ngwenya maintains the team are not getting ahead of themselves and that the recipe for success is to treat their opponents with respect if they are to get out of the group and go deep in the continental showpiece. 

“As a club, we literally take each game as it comes, we don’t want to plan too far ahead,” Ngwenya said. “We are planning for Saturday as things stand now.”

“We have to be realistic of what we are doing as a team and as other teams are here to compete as well, we must show them some respect. When we started in the tournament [2022] it was a new journey but now we are clear about the things that we want to achieve as a ball club,” he said.

With the SA sporting fraternity still basking in the glory of the solid performance of the national football team at the African Cup of Nations and the Springboks’ heroics at the Rugby World Cup in France in 2023, expectations will be for the Tigers to proceed to the next round with flying colours, especially with the advantage of playing at home. 

There will also be additional pressure for the side to showcase how basketball, which is not the first-choice sport for the majority of children across the country’s nine provinces, has grown in the country and its potential in years to come. 

Ngwenya is aware of the pressure that expectation from fans brings.

“We have prepared to absorb the pressure. Playing at home for the first time is difficult but we have to put on a spectacle and showcase what we can do on home soil,” Ngwenya said. 

He said they had emphasised working on the issue of having slow starts. In the BAL qualifiers, the Tigers had to play catch-up in the majority of their games. They were forced to throw the kitchen sink at Uganda’s City Oilers to win their East Division Elite 16 final 70-68 after trailing 37-36 at halftime.

The weekend fixtures at SunBet Arena are:

Saturday: FUS Rabat Basketball (Morocco) vs Petro de Luanda (4pm); Cape Town Tigers (SA) vs Dynamo Basketball Club (7pm)

Sunday: Dynamo vs FUS Rabat (4pm); Cape Town Tigers vs Petro de Luanda (7pm)

• Anathi Wulushe is in Pretoria as a guest of BAL