Basketball On The Internet.

MARK Worthington probably booked his ticket to Spain for this year’s World Cup but let’s be honest – Game 2 of the Sino-Australia Challenge was ghastly.

While the Boomers handsomely won 85-64 at Perth’s Challenge Stadium on Saturday, the game was ugly, the antics of the Chinese most unprofessional and we can most likely expect Games 3 and 4 in China to be blatantly whistled for the home team.

Which makes you wonder what the point even is.

Out on Saturday night, I IQ-ed the game to watch later and found myself too often fast-forwarding through portions of the match.

It just wasn’t that interesting.

Maybe I’d been spoilt by watching the San Antonio-OKC NBA Game 6 in the morning Sunday, which clouded my impressions of the Sino-Australia contest.

Maybe already knowing the result and just waiting to see at which points the match started to crumble as a “friendly” and devolve into an “unfriendly” also impacted on my general enjoyment.

But I am a believer when you commit to being an active participant in a game, you comply with the rules of that game.

Especially if you are coaching.

So when you cop a second technical foul – as the Chinese coach did – the rules say you leave.

You don’t hang around and play the hard-done-by card, the I-don’t-understand card or the throw-my-hands-in-the-air-and-despair card.

That’s BS, whether you are pulling the stunt here, in China or in Bulgaria.

All it achieves is to make a mockery of the contest and, worse, by example tell your players it is, in fact, OK to carry on as if you are being victimised and to disregard the local authority.

Like I said, BS.

It is times such as these FIBA needs to intervene, watch the game video and mete out appropriate judgment instead of acting like the United Nations and hiding from the many ugly international truths the world daily puts into our faces.

(Still waiting on a U.N. reaction to the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped seven weeks ago by terrorists in Nigeria for example, or stepping up to promote a global effort to find Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. Or challenging the so-called “honor killings” in Pakistan. Yes, all that is an ugly world away from our little basketball globe, but official inaction appears to be the trait of the day in this 21st century and in this instance, surely also applies to FIBA.)

International friendlies quickly become international farces when the visiting nation plays those tired we-don’t-know-what’s-going-on clichés of alleged bewilderment.

We know it is about covering for the fact you are getting belted, because the amount of whining during a Game 1 China controlled for about 75 per cent, was minimal and there was much less evidence of any misunderstandings.

All the threat of taking off his Chinese team did in Game 2 was mask how well the Boomers played for long and definitive stretches in the match and focus attention on officiating which was, admittedly, not great.

There was much mystery in the techs and USFs, none of it unravelled by our TV color commentary man Tony “The Bear-ly Adequate” Ronaldson.

Hard-To started the pre-match by referring to Australia’s struggles in Game 1 and how the Boomers “couldn’t hit the side of a bar”.

Maybe they had spent too much time in one.

(It’s “barn” Tony, the side of a barn… Oh my goodness.)

Suffice to say, Game 2 was forgettable for all the wrong reasons, Wortho leading the Boomers scoring, Luke Nevill again prominent and Brock Motum in double figures once more, though not as impressive as in the Game 1 overtime comeback win.

Have a safe flight to China fellas.

Got a feeling you’re in for a rough pair of matches.