Pearls Relegated to No. 19 in World Ranking
The Fijian Pearls ranking has dropped four places down according to the latest World Netball (WN) world ranking released yesterday. The Pearls are now ranked 19th behind Samoa, based on how they performed to March 1 this year.
They were ranked 15 before the Nations Cup in Singapore last December where they lost 65-37 to unseeded Botswana.
“In a World Cup year, it is important to get as much match play as possible, even when it affects our world ranking,” Netball Fiji chief executive officer Vivian Koster said.
“We qualified on merit for the Netball World Cup and we are doing everything we can to ensure we have a good outing,” she said. “We now have two specialist coaches working with our head coach to ready ourselves for the Netball World Cup.
“Going forward we are establishing a high performance committee to provide greater guidance for the Pearls.”
In the updated rankings; the top six have retained their positions with Fiji’s World Cup opponents Australia and Tonga at number one and seven respectively, while Zimbabwe is ranked 13th.
The annual update sees matches from the ranking year July 1 , 2018 – June 30, 2019 removed from the WN world rankings, According to World Netball, from March 1 the ranking points earned from the matches played from the March 1, 2022 will be weighted at 100 per cent, whilst ranking points earned from matches played in the two prior rating periods (July 1, 2019 – 30th June 2020 and 1st July 2020 – 28th February 2022) are now only weighted at 50 per cent. In response to the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and the period when international play was suspended, World Netball’s ranking year from July 1, 2020 was extended to February 28, 2022 which is 20 months.
The latest rankings table sees the top six teams remain the same with Australia on top, followed by New Zealand (second), England (third), Jamaica (fourth) , South Africa (fifth) and Malawi in (sixth).
Tonga moved up one position to seventh spot while Uganda moved down to eighth. This is the only positional change in the top 16 and reflecting on Tonga’s continuing dominance of the PacificAus Netball Series. To retain or gain a ranking from September 1, 2023, teams must have played at least ranking 8 matches since July 1, 2019. The Netball World Cup will be held at Cape Town, South Africa from July 28 to August 6.