In the spirit of sporting endeavour (curse you, autocorrect! We aren’t all barely literate Americans. I will spell the Queen’s English in the way I was brought up, without your childish corrections. Don’t you underline my words in that aggressive dotted red line, you upstart!) as epitomized by our (possibly briefly) resurgent cricket team, here is an old netball match report, from back when I was fit enough (or possibly less fearful of personal injury) to play a team sport. In addition: congrats finally to the Central Pulse!
From: Kirsty Jordan
Sent: Monday, 10 March 2014 10:03 p.m.
To: Hospital Hot Shots
Subject: RE: A double challenge coming up
Hi All,
A big night and I’m tired. Maybe I should have written this before I had my dinner, I’m already forgetting the details and the two games we played are merging into one. As advertised, we had two games to play tonight, but our opponents were not as we expected: first up we played against the Goonies, and second a team we hadn’t played before called Mortal Combat. Playing for us we had everyone listed below except Kate, who’s husband Titch was held up at work ( probably anaesthetic delays… ). Tom was too busy setting fire to his wedding venue to come. Romilla was a little late as she had the start time wrong, and was distracted doing housework. Our only new player tonight was Arezoo. She has played indoor netball before, and in fact has broken her shoulder playing, so obviously someone with an impressive amount of commitment to the game! As these were grading games, the idea was to have some fun, try hard but maybe not too hard, and have a go in different positions. The grade we played in last season was just about right, anything too much harder wouldn’t be much fun. In reality there was some role swapping going on, but people do just seem to gravitate to the positions they’re most comfortable in. Our ref for both games was Jane, who was generally good, although making Sarah get off the court for a quarter so she could take off or tape over her totally flat ring was just bogus ( or do I mean random? ).
The Goonies were familiar to us, we played them regularly a few seasons ago and apparently used to lose every game! I think they beat us in the final that season. They are obviously an experienced team who have played together a long time. They seemed to get alot of intercepts, and were also fond of two pointers. Joe has written down the scores but there only seems to have been three quarters…I will have use my mathematical deducting abilites here… Anyway 12:8 to us in the first quarter , and we won every quarter after that. 11:4, 7:5, and finally 9:6 to give us a flattering 39:23 final score. The worst part of the game was having to play in Deanes sweaty bib when I was replacing him at centre for a quarter. I’m sure that explains my below par performance. Sarah was very reliable with her shooting as usual and they seemed to have no answer to her.
The second game was against Mortal Combat. I’m sure I recognised some of the players from other teams we have played in the past. At first they were short of players, and seemed a little disorganised, but very quickly they got going and started looking a very professional outfit. The intercepts were incredible, it seemed at times like there was no way to get a ball to go to one of our players. Their two attack players hardly ever had a go at shooting, mostly passing out to the centres to get two pointers – and they had at least three players who were very reliable at getting these. Rebounds were hard to get because their tall male attack got them all. The first quarter was 6:10 to them. It was at that point Jane decided to get strict with Sarah about her ring ( 5 quarters into our evening! ). That was very frustrating. We lost the next quarter 3:12. At the start of the next quarter, Hannah got injured – trying to intercept a ball, her finger was bent back horribly. She went off straight away to get it iced. I think it was at about this point that we decided we’d lost the game, and we started to get freer with trying new things and different positions. That quarter we lost 5:10, but the last quarter, maybe because the pressure was off, we tied with 6 all.
Well, a night of two halves, really, but actually both games were quite fun, with pleasant oppositions. The fact that we beat the Goonies so well hopefully means that we’ve been improving over the last few seasons. I think we all agreed at the end of the night that back to back games are not to be recommended, though. I saw the Pulse playing Southern Steal on Saturday, hoping to pick up a few tips, and I must say, I think we aren’t doing too badly. At least, you could tell that we were playing the same game. Or almost.
Two match reports for the price of one, I won’t have to write another for the rest of the season!
Cheers,
Kirsty.