Open team make early statement
A new warm-up technique adopted by the Taranaki open netball team is making players take ownership of their performance - and it’s getting results.
The side travelled to Wanganui at the weekend for their first tournament of the season, coming away with wins over Hutt Valley and Wellington.
This year, coach Che Tamati is asking the players to take control of their individual warm-ups and just do what they need. It puts the onus on the player to show up ready, and it’s paying dividends.
‘‘We still have that cohesiveness where we warm up together for 15 minutes or so, but with the
dynamics - like if you need to run of 20 minutes or five minutes to be ready - that’s where they take ownership,’’ Tamati said.
‘‘They all turn up at the level we want to be at.’’
The side started their weekend with a match against Hutt Valley that started out ‘‘scratchy,’’ but a better showing in the second half saw them come away with a fairly comfortable 58-42 win.
With some time between matches, the Taranaki team got a chance to look at their Wellington counterparts in action, which allowed them to identify the key player in the Wellington side - Silver Fern Ameliaranne Ekenasio.
So, when it came to the match, the Taranaki side knew what to do.
‘‘The girls did a great job of taking Ameliaranne out of the game and were able to take control.’’
It was a lopsided scoreline in the end, with Taranaki claiming a clinical 83-51 win.
‘‘I was surprised at the scoreline to be honest,’’ Tamati said. ‘‘But we said after we beat them last year that we wanted to do it again this year and the team played well and executed well to do that.’’
Tamati said he had been particularly impressed with StratfordEltham’s Rebecca Jury during the two matches. Jury, who had been moved to wing attack for the tour- nament, was dynamic in her role and worked hard to create a lot of chances.
After a hot start, the Taranaki team will travel to Wellington this weekend for their second lot of matches, before their final tournament of the year in Palmerston North in October. The sight of Jerome Kaino galloping around at All Blacks training yesterday had one or two pulses racing, but the veteran loose forward remains on the national team outer for now.
Kaino’s managed return for the All Blacks, following his heavily publicised personal issues that saw him return home early ahead of the Bledisloe opener, remains on track to have the veteran loose forward back in full mode for the away Rugby Championship visits to Argentina and South Africa.
The 81-test loose forward did train with the All Blacks, but assistant coach Ian Foster confirmed the 34-year-old would return, as planned, to Nick White’s Auckland team for Friday’s Mitre 10 Cup clash against Southland in Invercargill.
Kaino made his first Auckland appearance since 2010 in Saturday’s 49-38 defeat to Taranaki on Eden Park and Foster said the national coaches wanted to see more of him in that arena before he returned to test footy.
‘‘He came in yesterday. We’ve had ongoing conversations with him and it’s a matter of bringing him back in,’’ said Foster.
‘‘He has been out of the game for a little while and he’s got to show us he is in the right sort of condition to come back. ‘‘But it’s great having him back.’’ Kaino, a two-time World Cup winner, has had an untimely absence, with both Liam Squire and, last Saturday, Vaea Fifita producing standout displays in the No 6 jersey for the All Blacks.