‘Us scared of Queens, no ways’
Proteas quash Malawi claims
NETBALL South Africa chief executive Blanche de la Guerre has denied talks that the national Spar Proteas are not participating in the Africa Netball Cup set to kickoff tomorrow in Uganda due to fear of losing to Malawi.
If online articles are anything to go by, one would believe that the national squad’s nonparticipation is a strategy from the fear of losing to Malawi which will in turn affect the squad’s position in the log-standings in the International Netball Federation (INF).
An online article written by Joy Ndovi on the MW nation website states that the Proteas have in the past dodged playing against Malawi to protect their reputation as best in Africa.
In last year’s Fast 5 tournament the Proteas lost to the Queens of Malawi by a whopping 36-21.
In the 2015 Diamond Netball Tournament the Proteas came close to losing to Queens, who were leading throughout the game but managed a 40-35 win in the last quarter.
SA are in fifth place in the INF log-standings while Malawi are in sixth.
The Proteas have managed to maintain a top five position in the INF ranking since the 1995 World Championships in England.
De La Guerre dismissed the rumour saying the invitation to the Africa Cup came in late.
“We have a 24-month schedule for our team and the invitation was just confirmed only last month and the team had other commitments,” she said.
“We are not scared of Malawi in fact we invited them first to feature in our Diamond tournament but they couldn’t come down because of financial reasons so we postponed the challenge to be played in November,” she said.
De La Guerre said some of the players in the squad are due to make their debut in the Super Cup challenge in New Zealand and are leaving next week Thursday.
The challenge is taken up by top clubs around the world.
The executive officer said there are other countries that pose a threat to the standing of SA in the log and Malawi is not the only one.
“We are not concerned so much about Malawi because there are other countries that participate,” she said.
“We are also mindful of countries like New Zealand, Australia and England, those are the countries to be on the lookout for because they are very good,” she said.
She concluded by saying the national team were prepared to take on any team. They were ready for the World Youth Netball Championships to be held in Botswana next month.
Twenty countries have qualified for the tournament and the first game for SA will be on July 8, where they will clash with Barbados.
The Africa Cup will see six countries going head-to-head as they will be battling it out for glory starting this weekend.
The countries set to put Uganda MTN Arena alight are:
Botswana, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Zambia and Namibia.
While INF has nine full members in Africa only six will be in the Africa Cup challenge and SA is one out of the three countries that will not participate in the tournament while the other two are Lesotho and Swaziland.