In a game with everything on the line, one team came out to bully its opponent. The biggest women’s basketball game in Ireland for quite some time was a violent beat down. Killester battered Liffey Celtics in Dublin to claim the women’s Irish Super League with a 90-62 win
Unique circumstances require a unique solution. With nothing to separate Killester and Liffey Celtics at the top of the MissQuote.ie women’s Irish Super League at the end of the season, it all came down to this. A single game playoff to decide the biggest championship in Irish women’s basketball.
Bagdanaviciene came to ball
Ieva Bagdanavičienė was the undoubted star of the show in the first quarter. The Lithuanian had played a huge role in Killester winning the cup a year ago. In the opening 10 minutes of this battle, Bagdanavičienė stepped up again. She had 11 points in what proved the crucial performance of an otherwise back and forth opener.
Killester’s boost of having Bagdanavičienė in fine form allowed them to open up the floor a lot more. Liffey Celtics were running with them nicely but kept hitting walls offensively. Karl Kilbride’s outfit kept watching carefully crafted sets have to get abandoned for iso-ball out of necessity. It meant the edge stood with Killester after 10 minutes.
Walters hosts a block party
While it was Bagdanavičienė dominating on the scoring early, there was one clear defensive juggernaut in the first half. Keowa ‘Keke’ Walters raced to 4 blocks within the game’s first 14 minutes. More impressively, the Killester woman rarely had to leave her feet.
Walters simply bullied Liffey Celtics in the paint. She didn’t let the debate get near the basket. Walters simply put herself just inside the free throw line and dared opponents to shoot over her. More often than not, they could barely get it out of their hands before the Killester woman had swatted it away.
This wasn’t just basketball. This was a bully tossing its opponent around the court how it liked, when it liked. Save for a steal and score by Sorcha Tiernan, who picked the pocket of Claire Melia when she looked in to score, it was one way traffic.
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Endless options
Bagdanavičienė would be the first to say she’s not even the key offensive piece for Killester. That, of course, would be Claire Melia. She crossed the double digit mark in scoring early in the third quarter as Killester began to pile on.
She was ably assisted by Jiselle Thomas, who was also picking her shots for fun. We hadn’t hit the midway point of the third when the lead stretched to 20 for the first time. Killester were rampant and in no mood for mercy. Michelle Clarke also piled on the pain as the scoring deluge showed no sign of letting up.
With Bagdanavičienė continuing to find open looks, any thoughts of a Liffey Celtics comeback were dead in the water long before the fourth quarter began. This was a paddling, a pounding, and a pummeling. At both ends, Killester were just plain better than Liffey Celtics.
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A coronation
This wasn’t Istanbul and Vasilis Spanoulis wasn’t about to charge off the bench for Liffey Celtics. Killester had utterly dominated for 30 minutes and there was never any doubt that they’d close it out. The women in green did what they could but it was only ever going to be cosmetic.
At the end of a proper battle of an Irish Super League season, where both sides scaled their way past Brunell to force their way to the top of the table, it was an emphatic end to it. Killester were the bullies and rightly so. They came out here treating it like the culmination of their work and finished with authority. For Liffey Celtics, it looked like they had run out of oxygen scaling the mountain. Once they got to the top, they had nothing left to give. The biggest prize in Irish women’s basketball belonged to the team in orange.
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