Guide to the Netball Championship grand final

Okay netball fans, it’s time to get – what’s our favourite buzzword again – that’s right, physical, for the Trans-Tasman Championship grand final.

Last week the Queensland ‘Bodyslamming’ Firebirds crashed and bashed their way into the grand final, where they’ll meet the minor premiers, the Adelaide ‘Smash ’em up’ Thunderbirds.

State pride is on the line in this thrilling match-up, which will decide whether it’s best to recruit most of your players from NSW or Victoria.

On paper, the two teams look quite similar; both have tall, Jamaican goal shooters, but the Firebirds edge out the competition by virtue of theirs being named Romelda Aiken, who has been given the delightfully rhyming title of ‘Aiken the Jamaican’.

Similarly, both teams have a chronic lack of players raised in the state they’re representing in their starting line-up. The Adelaide team take the honours there, claiming two South Australians in their starting seven, to the Firebirds’ one Queenslander.

Both have slightly offbeat coaches; Rosalee Jencke of the Firebirds plays the role of the stern headmistress who has stepped straight out of the pages of an Enid Blyton book.

Any players that fail to “follow the game plan” or “treasure possession” are sure to face a punishment harsher than a first former that’s been caught frying kippers during a midnight feast.

On the other hand, we have the Thunderbirds’ Jane Woodlands-Thompson, more in the mould of Amy Poehler’s Mean Girls character, who positively longs to tell her players “I’m not a regular coach, I’m a cool coach!”

If your preferred method of selecting teams to support is based on hairstyles, you’re probably slightly odd, but we won’t go into that right now.

In any case, the Firebirds are the clear winners in the strange personalities stakes – Aiken dyed her braids a vivid shade of purple for the preliminary final as an obvious distraction technique to get the opposition wondering why on earth the Firebirds’ uniforms were purple, rather than the traditional Queensland maroon.

And wing attack Chelsea Pitman is the hair trendsetter of the competition, anointing the braided bun as the hairstyle of choice for 2013.

With the international season coming up, it’s also important to consider which team has the closest thing to a goalkeeper of Australia’s greatest ever, Liz Ellis’ standard.

This is the toughest call of all, as Sharni Layton from the Thunderbirds has Ellis’ admirable ability to keep up a constant stream of conversation while dominating a netball game, whereas Laura Geitz has the great one’s formidable attribute of taking screaming intercepts anywhere in the goal third, while maintaining her dignity in an extremely short skirt.

The position of goal attack is also an extremely important consideration. On one hand, the Firebirds have Natalie Medhurst, who was controversially unwanted by the Thunderbirds at the end of 2009 and thus has a point to prove.

On the other, the Thunderbirds have Erin Bell, the player who most closely resembles Netball Australia’s latest marketing gimmick, the netball Barbie. Victory for Bell’s team would surely see doll sales spike.

So it comes down to this. Both teams have their motivations and their drawbacks. But which team will be able to get their behemoth goal shooter to casually reach up and gently place the ball through the ring more times than their opposition?

And which team will win the equally as important race to denounce the physicality of the other team first? Well, if I knew that, I’d be a star in the lucrative and highly sought after world of netball betting.

Unfortunately, your guess is as good as mine.

The Trans-Tasman Championship grand final will be shown live at 2pm on Sunday 14 July on SBS2 and Fox Sports 2.