Grant in despair after awful loss
What message does a captain need to send in defeat?
At 6-2 down in the first quarter, the Central Pulse were always going to lose Wednesday’s national netball premiership top-of-the-table clash with the Southern Steel. Even then, one team was demonstrably better than the other. Only the Pulse will know if the final score of 80-44 was a fair reflection of the disparity between the two teams.
With the result a foregone conclusion, curiosity turned to how the Pulse would take it.
On that front, the body language of the beaten captain Katrina Grant was fascinating. She looked utterly deflated and demoralised and made no attempt to hide it.
This is Grant’s seventh season as Pulse skipper. Along the way she’s become New Zealand captain as well. She is a significant figure who teammates look to for their cues.
Some leaders might have clapped and cajoled and encouraged in that situation. But Grant, particularly after being switched to goal keep, cut a forlorn figure.
Had she still been at goal defence, there would have been a lot more involvement on attack. But, stuck in her third with Steel goal shoot Jhaniele Fowler-Reid, Grant just looked miserable.
In the circumstances, it was exactly the right way to communicate to the team.
‘‘I wouldn’t mind sweeping it under the rug, but we have to learn from it,’’ Grant said after the defeat at Te Rauparaha Arena.
‘‘There’s bits of it where we’ve got to be like ‘you know what, that game was rubbish. Forget it and move on’. But the thing is that I want the girls to remember what this feels like. You need to remember how this feels so you won’t do it again.’’
This, from her part, meant not shying away from what happened and who it happened in front of.
‘‘Friends, family, our supporters, our home. It’s hard yakka losing like that. It hurts, it hurts a lot.’’
It will be interesting now to see how the team respond to it, when they meet the Northern Mystics in Auckland next Wednesday.
‘‘We just need to show what we’re made of and show a bit of resilience out there. We kind of just fell apart and dropped off,’’ said Grant.
‘‘Anything we tried didn’t work. Even just walking [the ball] down the court didn’t work. We just weren’t smart. We didn’t play very smartly at all,’’ Grant said.
Hopefully they’re quick learners.