Wollongong coach Gordie McLeod expects a galvanised Hawks to show their true colours in tomorrow night's semi-final blockbuster against Townsville at WIN Entertainment Centre.
The Hawks returned to Wollongong last night after Wednesday night's 82-53 hammering from the Crocodiles at The Swamp.
Townsville rose to the occasion under pressure to level the best-of-three series at 1-1 and Wollongong will have to submit a similarly inspired performance in front of their home crowd if they are to advance to the grand final series against the Perth Wildcats.
Full coverage of the Wollongong Hawks The Crocs dominated game two, erasing the bad memories of their 19-point loss in the opening game at the WEC.
Harrassing the Hawks into 15 first-half turnovers and 21 for the game, Townsville built an 18-point lead at the main break and were never threatened over the final two quarters.
But as awful as the Hawks were, they soon took comfort in the fact they get to play the deciding game on a court where they have won 14 of 15 games in 2009-10.
They earned that advantage by finishing second on the ladder and should feel good about their chances of booking a grand final berth.
"The good thing for us is that we get to play another game and we're playing at this time of year, so we get another chance," McLeod said.
"We have to stop the bleeding, lick the wounds and re-evaluate. We have to make some adjustments and get ready to play Saturday.
"(The game two margin is) irrelevant. One or 65, it doesn't really matter. It's a series and it's the first team to win two games."
The Crocs looked nothing like the half-interested mob that sauntered into Wollongong for game one.
They stifled the Hawks' offence from start to finish, restricting their opponents to the club's lowest single-game total in 32 seasons.
"We knew we had to be good with the basketball; we knew the pressure was going to come and we didn't handle it very well at all," McLeod said.
"The same thing happened when we played up here in January after a good win at home, so we knew it was going to happen and it was very disappointing not to handle it better.
"If you're going to have 15 turnovers in the first half, you're really going to struggle. We felt we were probably lucky to only be down what we were at half-time.
"We needed to change that around in the second half, which we weren't able to do."
McLeod said his side's usual blue-collar work ethic was nowhere to be found.
"The effort areas is something we've been good at and they totally outworked us. They totally dominated us all night in all areas of the game.
"We didn't handle their disruptive defence and they had us at sixes and sevens all night. We didn't handle the emotions of the whole thing and that's part of the learning curve for us.
"We didn't handle the physicality, we didn't handle the bumping off the ball, we didn't handle any of that stuff.
"You have to come out with the hard hat on from the start of the game and they had it right. They did exactly to us what we did to them in Wollongong.
"They were up for it. They knew it was do or die and they played that way.
"The big thing now is recovery with the short turnaround time and making the adjustments to get ourselves ready for game three."
Tomorrow night's clash tips off at 6.30pm.
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