It’s getting to the business end of the ANZ Championship season, so here is all you need to know before you watch the finals series.
The conference system
Confused as to why there’s a finals game being played between sixth and eighth on the ladder in a 10-team competition? You’re not alone. The story goes that Sky TV in New Zealand realised that people in the land of the long white cloud weren’t quite so interested in watching games between teams that could all pronounce their vowels correctly.
There seemed to be rather a lot of these games come finals time, because the Kiwi teams – how can I put this delicately – are not very good. So Sky TV told Australia that they’d take their bat and ball (aka money) and go home unless more New Zealand teams made the finals. So now we have six teams in the finals, three from each country:
Australia
1. Queensland Firebirds
2. New South Wales Swifts
3. West Coast Fever
New Zealand
4. Northern Mystics
6. Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic
8. Southern Steel
Not pictured
5. Melbourne Vixens (Australia)
7. Adelaide Thunderbirds (Australia)
9. Central Pulse (NZ)
10. Mainland Tactix (NZ)
Who to get behind?
Queensland Firebirds
Working in their favour is the fact that they have the ever-likeable Australian Diamonds captain Laura Geitz leading their team. New to the side in 2015 is the exciting young goal attack Gretel Tippett, who has shaken up the competition with her netball-basketball hybrid style. Working against them is, of course, the fact that they are from Queensland. If you can’t look past this, that is completely understandable.
New South Wales Swifts
The Swifts have not won a finals game since 2008, when they took out the title, so in ever increasing desperation, this season they purchased every midcourt player in the southern hemisphere and grabbed one from the northern hemisphere, just for good measure. Unfortunately they realised that the rules only allow for three midcourt players to take the court at once, thus throwing a spanner in their very complicated works.
Stats man and head coach Rob Wright eventually found the right mathematical formula and the team has come good at the (w)right time. Cheer for them if you like the colour red. Turn your backs if you’re morally opposed to NSW teams with Victorians in them.
West Coast Fever
This plucky young bunch of underdogs have been a plucky young bunch of underdogs since time began. So much so that some, shall we say, ‘haters’ think they should have grown up and started doing something aside from being plucky by now. This season they decided to shut everyone up and do just that, surging out to a blazing start and crushing every team in their path.
Unfortunately, by the end of the season, their pluckiness had come back to bite them in the bum and they had an uninspiring finish to the regular season. But their start was enough to secure them a place in the finals, where they take on the NSW Swifts in a do-or-die game on Friday night.
They’re your team if you love a fast-paced, exciting game complete with a magic pixie (Natalie Medhurst) who seems to have the ball on a string and netball’s own superhero – the high-flying Ashleigh Brazill. Forget about them if you have heart problems or are in the late stages of pregnancy and don’t want to go into stress-induced labour.
Northern Mystics
Here is a team that chose their name based purely on how funny it would sound to Australian ears when they used it. Good sense of humour, those Kiwis. The Mystics surprised everyone – most of all their own fans – by topping the New Zealand conference this year. Not because they didn’t have the players to do it, as they clearly had the strongest roster in the conference, but because they’ve been the best team on paper in many seasons before and still managed to lose in new and hilarious ways every time.
While it was a shame to see them forget about their commitment to comedy, I suppose their commitment to netball is also admirable. Get on board if you like watching supermodels play netball and can take a bit of unpredictability. Look elsewhere if you’re morally opposed to silliness or the thought of musk sticks makes you ill.
Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic
This team cemented themselves into everyone’s bad books by announcing at their team launch in 2008 that they would be the inaugural winners of the ANZ Championship. Much to everyone’s delight, they were wrong. From then on, they have taken the much more sensible position of putting together a worse and worse team on paper every year so that they are written off completely, only to prove everyone wrong.
This year that took the form of a serious knee injury to captain Casey Kopua, which was quite an extreme way to go about it. The team pressed on in her absence and she’s made a remarkable return in time to inspire her team for finals. Go for them if you love heart-warming tales of the little guys triumphing against adversity. Find a different team if you still harbour a grudge about their arrogance in 2008.
Southern Steel
The Steel’s road to the finals has been quite a remarkable one. So much so that I hope no one has been tasked with cutting up a highlights package of their season so far, because that would be an unenviable task indeed. The Steel have played 13 matches this year. They have won three of those matches. Two of those were against the bottom placed Tactix who were basically handing out two points to their opponents as they walked through the door.
And yet, here they are in the finals. I bet the Western Force wish the Super Rugby conference system worked like this one. The Steel are the team for you if you enjoy blind optimism and shun reality in all its forms. Better to go for someone else if you’re looking for a team to cheer for beyond this one game.
The verdict
The weekend starts with the knockout finals in each conference (Swifts versus Fever on Friday night and Magic versus Steel on Saturday afternoon) with the winners of each to take on their conference champions on Sunday afternoon (Firebirds) and Monday night (Mystics). It’s a full on weekend of netball, so get your oranges cut up into quarters and your thundersticks ready and enjoy the ride.
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