Luckless Titans go down again

Danny Haymes (Shawn Smits)

Harper Sercombe

It’s been a luckless start to the season for the North Western Titans, going down in another tight loss on Sunday afternoon in Baseball Victoria summer league.

The Titans faced top-three side Waverley for their round nine metro major 1 clash, losing 9-7.

The struggling Titans have won just one of their nine games so far, but coach Danny Haymes said the wins and losses don’t tell the whole story.

“We’re working through some little things that we’ve been developing,” he said.

“We have a lot of new players at the club that are new to the games so we’re working through some areas that we need to improve on.

“We’re getting better week by week, even though we’ve only won one game we’ve been unlucky in a handful of games.

“Our offence has been what’s lacking, our defence isn’t too bad, but we certainly need to improve our offence.”

Speaking before the game against Waverley, Haymes said it would be a good opportunity to put what they have been working at on show.

Before the weekend’s match the Titans had been averaging just 3.38 runs a game, to equal a season high of seven runs on the weekend is an encouraging sign heading into the Christmas break.

“We had a pretty tight game against them last time we played them, we lost 6-1 but it was only 3-1 until about the fifth dig, so it was a pretty tight game,” Haymes said.

“We’re expecting a hard game again and we’re at home and we are pretty hard to beat at home, even though we’ve lost a couple of games at home this season, we’ve been very competitive.

“We’re still optimistic that we’ll have a crack and try to get a win.”

In the higher up premier divisions of the Baseball Victoria summer season, the competitions are set to split in half after the break, however with the smaller competition of metro major having just six teams, it is still unclear how the league will restart post break.

However, with two games upcoming before the break Haymes is hoping his team can start to turn its luck around.

“I’d like to see us get some wins for the work that we’ve been doing on the training track because I don’t think the results have been that bad,” he said.

“As long as we’re competitive, we set our own goals, the results are not always the end all of what we’re looking at, we’re looking at what we’re doing as a group to improve and the end results will come eventually.”

The Titans are set to play St Kilda on Sunday.