So the dust has settled on the first week of the trans-Tasman netball league finals and six teams have become four (which, incidentally was the first draft of that Spice Girls song).
The West Coast Fever begged for mercy after 4000 primary school girls were dispatched to screech in unison for 90 minutes straight during the Australian Conference Elimination Final in Sydney.
In return, however, they gave the New South Wales Swifts a bit of a battering, which the home team were able to withstand until the mercy rule was called on the school children, and the Swifts walked out with the win and their life-saving earplugs intact.
On the other side of the Tasman, about seven people showed up to watch the Southern Steel bewilderedly stumble their way into the New Zealand conference elimination final against the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic.
Much to the surprise of everyone – not least the Steel themselves – the game ended in a draw and extra time had to be played. The Magic finally pulled themselves together and took out the game by two goals.
If you think the competition had been ridiculous up to this point, prepare yourself, because here was where it got really stupid. Each winning team from the elimination finals had to drag their sore and sorry bodies off on an away trip to play the conference final two days later. So that gave the very fresh and relaxed Queensland Firebirds and Northern Mystics a huge advantage, on top of being allocated home finals.
Ostensibly this short turnaround was to ensure the season didn’t run too long in a World Cup year. Why the season couldn’t have just started a week earlier isn’t clear to anyone, except TTNL General Manager Andy Crook, who – if rumours are to be believed – created the draw by putting a giant calendar on the wall of his office, before wildly flinging spaghetti strands in the colours of each team at it and seeing what stuck.
So the poor old Swifts had another bruising encounter with the well-rested Firebirds, who hummed along at half pace for a while, before putting slamming on the accelerator and running over the Swifts, then reversing and running over them again, just for good measure.
Realising they needed some players to live to see the next game, Rob Wright ran some numbers and made some substitutions. Getting Sharni ‘Never Say Die’ Layton off the court was no mean feat, and multiple players had to assist with holding her down on the bench. This meant that the only player available to take her place at goal keeper was goal shooter Erin Hoare, who spent much of her time on court checking to make sure that it really was a ‘K’ on her bib, before doing an admirable job on Jamaican super shooter Romelda Aiken.
The Magic, however, appeared to have hired a hypnotist to make them forget they played just two days earlier and ground the Mystics down into a fine pulp, winning the right to host a semi-final. Captain Casey Kopua showed she’s still got it after spending most of the season sidelined with a knee injury, when she took a pivotal intercept in the final quarter to drag her team into the lead.
So on to Week 2 of the finals. In a bizarre move, TTNL has decided teams need only play one final per weekend from here on in, which really evens out the contest. Where’s the fun in having both teams well rested when we could be watching one team painfully hobble around the court covered head to toe in strapping tape?
This week the Mystics head to Queensland, supposedly to take on the Firebirds in a semi-final, but realistically to position them closer to the Gold Coast, which is an ideal Mad Monday location.
The main point of interest in this game concerns socks. Yes, that’s right – socks. As every little girl who’s ever pulled on a netball bib could tell you, uniforms are kind of a big deal. Even if it’s minus nine degrees on a frosty Canberra morning, that little eight-year-old girl is dreaming if she thinks she can wear a long-sleeved top under her netball uniform.
Mystics captain Maria Tutaia has been throwing down a challenge to all that uphold the uniformly principles of our great game by wearing increasingly ridiculous-coloured long socks. Apparently they are for ‘injury management’, but general manager Andy Crook took some time out of his busy spaghetti-throwing schedule to accuse her of promoting a personal sponsor. She has also been suspected of purposely wearing the colours of the opposing team presumably so they think her legs are tiny little players and pass the ball to them, which seems a bizarre and somewhat ineffective tactic, but she’s the mastermind, not I.
Different combinations of compression tops and sleeves have also been deployed at different times, so we all wait with bated breath to see what she pulls out this week. My money’s on a morph suit which changes colours between Mystics blue and Firebirds purple depending on who has the ball.
The other match has a much more conventional focus: who is going to win? Can the Magic knock the Swifts out of the finals race for the second year in a row? Will the Swifts be capable of playing in front of the relative silence of the Hamilton ‘crowd’? Will Sharni Layton turn on her evil master Rob Wright after being benched last week? None of this is as interesting as socks of course, but we must work with what we have.
The winners of these two matches will meet the grand final a week later, the host of which will be decided by the captains visiting Crook’s office and telling him their favourite animal. Whoever gets the answer right gets to host the match. The other team will be forced to play all eight other teams in the league every day in the lead up to the game and if they lose at any time, will be replaced in the grand final by an inner western Sydney under 14 representative team.
So bring on Sunday, when we’ll see if the Australian teams stomp all over their inferior Kiwi counterparts or if the idea of another all-Australian final angers the Sky TV gods so greatly that a mysterious lightning storm strikes down the goal posts the Swifts are shooting at in the last quarter.
Only time will tell.
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