Malawi dances to Silver Ferns’ malady

Bring on Botswana.

Cayman Islands, we have your number.

Feel our wrath, Gibraltar.

All right, we’re not prepared to lower our expectations quite that much. But netball is in pain, right now.

Against a pleasing array of New Zealanders coming up with the goods in many areas of the Commonwealth Games, the Silver Ferns have produced a 53-57 loss to Malawi that by any measure stands as a low point, perhaps the lowest in our netballing history.

It is almost a medical event. While so many other athletes wearing our colours have sent hearts swelling with pride, that result had hearts pumping emptily, as if starved by a blood clot.

This might seem a tad condescending to the victors, who went into these games with a reasonable claim to be the fifth or sixth strongest team in the world. That’s how they pretty reliably finish in the World Cup, World Series and previous Commonwealth Games.

It’s just they’ve always been seen as the best of the rest, at best – still emphatically and entirely the wrong side of a chasm separating them from the sport’s three, maybe four, true powerhouse teams.

As evidenced, we all thought, by the fact that even during the Ferns’ dispiritingly out-of-tune buildup for the games, they still managed to beat the Africans 75-42 just weeks beforehand.

It would be a thoroughly good thing for the sport to see that gap close. But for the right reasons. The Malawi players have certainly been doing their part, and all the more admirably considering theirs is one of the world’s least-developed countries.

But the Ferns’ more than met them halfway by slumping so badly when faced with the clearly unexpected strength of the challenge from a team playing with spirit intact. While the Malawi players danced in exuberant delight afterwards, the Kiwis departed to the not-so-distant sound of Australian laughter.

To take the view that it’s simply too late to achieve a true turnaround in form is unworthily pessimistic.

This doesn’t mean it’s likely, we grant you.

But there’s a case to muster, as best we can, some careworn hope on the basis that wins against Scotland and England are still entirely achievable if the Kiwis recalibrate sufficiently to play to their abilities. After that, well, let’s see what else we might have learned or rediscovered.

The Silver Ferns are doing terribly at the Commonwealth Games. But rather than purse-lipped scowling reproach, a few gestures of support would seem to be in order.

Perhaps this is a test not only of their mettle, but of their supporters.

The Southland Times