Basketball Gloucester City Sports

WBBL Round 24 Preview: Gloucester City Queens v Essex Rebels

Gloucester City Queens will travel down to southeast England on Saturday where they’ll face Essex Rebels in round 24 of the Women’s British Basketball League.

The Gloucester side head to the Essex Sports Arena on the back of 10 straight defeats with their last victory being 75-69 against Nottingham Wildcats at Oxstalls back in January.

Head coach Jay Marriott is fully aware on what his Queens side will come up against on Saturday as they played the Rebels at Oxstalls three weeks ago where the game finished in a disappointing 42-91 defeat.

Queens will be hoping that their in-form players Marlee Ball and Carolina Marques will be firing on all cylinders this weekend. Both of which are in double figures for average points scored this season.

Ball who’s been with the Queens since the franchise was established, has a 14.0 average points tally along with 2.3 average assists and an impressive 8.1 in total rebounds.

Marques on the other hand joined up with the Queens in January after previously playing for the Worcester Wolves who reside in the National Women’s Basketball League, which is the league below Gloucester.

Marques has had an electrifying start to life in Gloucester and has made such a positive impact on the team. The Portuguese star has scored 11.6 average points this season as well as 3.1 assists.

There’s no getting away from the fact that the Queens have been incredibly unlucky in regards to injuries this season and they will be without some individuals for this upcoming game.

Star player and captain Maura Fitzpatrick sadly suffered an ACL injury earlier on in the season and was ruled out indefinitely and subsequently travelled back home to begin rehabilitation.

More recently though Shanice Turner and Bianca Osas-Maxwell have been on the receiving end of injury problems as head coach Jay Marriott confirmed, “We’re still waiting on a bit more clarity but I think we can expect not to see Shanice for the rest of the season, even if its a risky 50/50 we’re not going to do it.

“We don’t want to injure players we want to think about the future. Sadly I don’t see Bianca back for the rest of the season. I don’t want to go into too much detail but she’s spent some time in hospital and we’ve been in touch.

“She (Bianca) seems in really good spirits however it does look like it’ll be a long-term recovery for her.”

Despite the injury setbacks the Queens still have a large roster to pick from and are expected to have the majority of their players available for the trip to Essex.

Tip Off is scheduled for 5pm BST this Saturday afternoon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *