The pressure’s all on the Steel
The Central Pulse have won 10 games this season. Compare that to the combined total of five they rustled up in Yvette Mccauslanddurie’s first three-year stint as coach.
Back then one win a season often against the Mainland Tactix was deemed to be acceptable.
Now the Pulse are in a grand final. Granted, the absence of Australian sides this year makes that 10-win total a little misleading. The Pulse won eight games back in 2013 and this team isn’t a patch on that one.
Still, the 10 wins do say a bit about this squad and Mccauslanddurie and how they’ve defied a few predictions this year.
Things are different for tonight’s opponents. Everyone knew the Southern Steel were the best team before the season started and everyone expects them to win the decider in Invercargill by a cricket score. Only the expectations were the same last year and the Steel gagged. No pressure.
It was the Waikato-bay of Plenty Magic who emerged as the New Zealand conference champions instead and that will haunt the Steel.
They’ve played good netball over the last two regular seasons, but having nothing to show for it is something of a stain.
The Pulse have done little to suggest they’ll win tonight. They’ve played the Steel three times this year - four if you throw in pre-season - and lost the lot. The memory of the 80-44 loss in Porirua just over a month ago is particularly hard to shake.
Sunday’s 59-52 eliminationalfinal win over the Northern Mystics was the Pulse’s first playoff game, so they have no finals pedigree to fall back. And yet the quiet way they’ve built this season and the Steel’s final loss last year mean the Pulse have travelled south with a strong sense that they deserve to be there.
‘‘We’ve been convincing ourselves all premiership, really. With a new combination and not knowing how we were going to settle, we weren’t probably a team that people thought were going to come through,’’ said Mccausland-durie, who previously coached the team from 2009-2011.
‘‘But they’ve just been really clear about the basics and they’ve stayed really tuned in about our [determination to get from] centre pass to score. They have a fantastic connection with each other and they’ll go to war together and they enjoy playing.
‘‘When you keep the enjoyment in, then they can be more relaxed out there and realise that
opportunities will come if we stay in it.’’
It comes back to that whole scenario where one grand finalist is under a lot of pressure to finally win and the other has already created history by getting there.
Some might see it as defeatist to celebrate before you’ve actually won something, but the Pulse weren’t the slightest bit embarrassed about making a big deal of beating the Mystics. You would too, if you had a pedigree like the Pulse’s and the old Capital Shakers and Western Flyers national league teams that preceded them.
‘‘In our change room they’d done up a really big piece on the history of the Shakers and Flyers and just photos of players who had gone before and I did a bit about that in my presentation to the team,’’ Mccausland-durie said.
‘‘We’re here now and we’ve got an opportunity that others who walked before us weren’t able to make, so we might as well come out and give it a real crack.’’