Axe To Be Swung at Melbourne

Melbourne United coach Dean Vickerman has dropped the strongest hint yet that import Jordan Caroline’s days are numbered with the side, declaring the club is “searching for a guy” to help cover the loss of  injured centre Ariel Hukporti.

Caroline has been forced to play as an undersized five for much of his stint in the league so far, and with Isaac Humphries once again getting himself in foul trouble against the Kings on Sunday he struggled to hit his shots at the rim – shooting just 3/11 from the field on the night.

“I still think the games we’ve won the boards, we’ve won the game. I just think we haven’t been able to compete in that area or have another threat running at the rim and finishing,” Vickerman said post-game.

“I thought the shots 'JC' (Caroline) had tonight, we were talking in the locker room like ‘wow, if Jack White had every one of those catches and takes at the rim and able to finish it, they were 11 good shots’, but he hasn’t been able to finish some of those over the length of some of the people in this league.

“I’ve been open, we’re searching for a guy. We haven’t found the right guy yet.”

The loss to the Kings saw Melbourne slump to a 2-4 record for the season and, for the first time in their history, United have dropped four straight games at John Cain Arena.

After leading trailing by just one-point at half time, the injury depleted side once again ran out of steam and as a result were on the wrong side a 17-point second half margin.

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“You can see when we just run out of juice,” Vickerman said. “It’s partly on me because I haven’t trusted the bench enough and I haven’t got enough production off the bench to keep moving people and keep people fresh enough.

“I’m asking people to play 32, 33 minutes and I can see the drop-off. I wanted to use timeouts strategically tonight so we could do that, we backed off who we are defensively a lot to pick up people at halfway and not pressure up the floor and try to take some load out of people.

“We got to that point where multiple people are tired on the floor and all our execution goes out the window. Our brains stop functioning, even messages in timeouts or messages at free throws about what we wanted to get done, it couldn’t happen.

“It’s disappointing that when we get that tired we don’t have the ability to execute.”

United will be hoping to snap their three-game losing streak this weekend against Illawarra.