The Sunday Mail
Yesterday Zimbabwe Gems booked their second slot in the Netball World Cup, for the second tournament running, with a fine win over neighbouring Zambia, and a win that will help restore the momentum given in the 2019 World Cup when at long last the sport made the top slot on the sport pages and, in a difficult year, helped bring a lot of cheer to the nation.
The qualification battle was in some ways a bit tougher this year, with nine countries in the qualification tournament, compared to six in 2018, when African netballers assembled in Lusaka, although this year South Africa, who had already automatically qualified as host, and would anyway have qualified as number five, decided to take part.
But that opened the gate to three teams, and if South Africa, as expected being generally the top African nation, took one of the top two slots the third-placed would qualify, and yesterday Zimbabwe came third.
Malawi took the slot from the finals. South Africa had already qualified. Uganda had already qualified, being sixth in the world, but since South Africa as fifth was also host of the final that meant the last of the top-five tickets went to Uganda. So the 2023 finals see the same four African teams we saw in 2019: South Africa, Uganda, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
Netball came of age in Zimbabwe in the 2019 Netball World Cup when the Gems made it through the qualifiers for one of the two specific African slots decided on qualifiers rather than being one of the five best teams in the world and the remarkable performance cheered the nation.
In the end, Zimbabwe came eighth, just in the top half of the final 16 nations that made it to Liverpool for the finals, and showed where our potential lies in a sport that could now move ahead fast and attract a lot more players and sponsorship.
Then came Covid-19, and along with so much else. A lot of sport took a back seat and netball was hit hard for two years. But when competitive sport was allowed to resume, the local league moved fast. Obviously, our players, or at least our better players, had been keeping up with the fitness and were ready to move.
This year sees the qualifiers for the 2023 World Cup, being held in Cape Town in just under a year.
In the just-finished African qualifiers, this time in Pretoria, Zimbabwe came through with one of the two African passes on offer.
So once again we are in the final 16, but it was closer than we imagined or hoped and there is obviously a lot to do in the next 11 months.
The work that now needs to be done is fairly obvious. Zimbabwe is through, but with the bottom African slot, and so we need to move up the ladder significantly over the next 11 months.
For 2019, there was some significant support from the private sector, especially with even the need for air fares to Britain. This time round the trip is next door, so even with the same amount of support more can be done.
But we need to mobilise better. The Gems deserve that support, after qualifying with very modest support, and Zimbabwean netball is still an underfunded and amateur game. In many ways that is its delight, but it shows the weaknesses in building up the team to levels needed. We need to think of some of those sporting powerhouses we will be mixing with in Cape Town.
The support is needed now and there is a lot we can do if we start in time. Ensuring the local league flourishes is obviously a good starting point since this is where our top players largely come from. It is there, it is working well, it is properly organised and we can continually upgrade.
Our national coaches and selectors will want to see what else we can do, and who else is moving up. So we will need other tournaments where new combinations can be tried out and the final pool pushed to their limit. We must have a larger pool of top-class world players. We do not need a position that if our top scorer is limping from a twisted knee on the day we die; our second best and third best scorers need to be ready to move in and shoot.
In too many sports we are over-reliant on too small a pool. Netball, as a near mass sport, needs to leave that behind.
We need practice games. Interestingly, we might have beaten Botswana, Namibia and Zambia on our way to the qualifying slot, but the results were hardly one way and we had to work flat out for every point.
Malawi beat us to take the number one qualifying tag on offer but again they had to sweat for that. So with South Africa, there is a very nice sub-regional pool of countries already here and next door.
We should get around and build the strength of the Africa teams. That requires some money, not big money but some, hence the need for more support.
We need to remember that in 2019 all four African teams were in the top half, in fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth places, so building up ourselves by helping to build Africa as well makes sense.
We seem to be the second quadrille, and several of us at least need to get into the top quarter.
The Gems did their stuff last week. Now Zimbabwe needs to convert pride in their achievement and give them the backing they need and deserve. Netball Zimbabwe, with decent private sector and Government backing, can do that. So let us not wait.
