An invitation to watch a netball match elicits one of two responses from the men in my life.
It’s either, ‘Cor, yeah, 14 fit women running around in Lycra. Yes please’ or, more commonly, a cutting comment about how rubbish netball was at school, when chubby girls in pleated skirts and baggy bibs chucked a ball around on the playground during PE lessons.
The fact is, most men would not be seen dead at a netball match. So England Netball, the sport’s governing body, launched their ‘Bring a Bloke’ campaign during last season’s Co-operative Netball Super League to tackle a problem in a sport that more than one million women and girls play every week.
Because if you can’t go home and chat about your game with your dad, brother, male friends or partner, then they can’t share something that really matters to you.
When I asked my boyfriend, Richard, if he would join me at London’s O2 Arena on Sunday afternoon to watch England take on Jamaica, he responded in the same way as he does when I invite him to a Grimsby Town match.
He sighed and said ‘yes’ in the way you do when asked if you want a receipt for your council tax bill. But he came, he didn’t make any patronising comments and he didn’t go to the bar until half-time, which was no mean feat considering he was surrounded by 7,000 screaming schoolgirls and a Jamaican lady banging two saucepan lids together.
We expected a feisty, physical encounter as England have history with the Jamaican ‘Sunshine Girls’, who beat them by a single goal in the third place play-offs of the 2007 World Championship.
But England were always on top in the first match of a three-Test series, although they failed to win every quarter, as England coach Sue Hawkins had requested in her programme notes.
It was 21-9 to England after the first quarter and you could hear goal defence Sonia Mkoloma, who shares the captaincy with Karen Atkinson, bellowing at her team-mates to ‘control the ball’ in the attacking third.
In which other sport would you see a goal every 30 seconds? That’s what most people fail to realise about high-level netball – it’s damn fast, played on a court measuring just 100ft by 50ft. Imagine sprinting around a football penalty box for four 15-minute periods – stopping, turning, changing direction and elbowing your way past your opponent. You have to be seriously fit. And strong.
Mkoloma and goalkeeper Geva Mentor kept Jamaica’s shooters shackled with tight, feisty marking. It was man to man – sorry, woman to woman – stuff, with the kind of physical shenanigans that you see every week in the penalty box at a football match. The netball court is no place for shrinking violets.
England dominated the first half and won all but the final quarter, triumphing 67- 54.
Player of the match Joanne Harten, who said her dad was watching in the crowd, admitted England were disappointed with their second-half performance, but added: ‘I think it’s awesome they’re trying to get more men in to watch.
‘There’s loads of physical contact. My dad loves it, not just because he can watch me play. It’s a real contact sport and it’s so fast.’
Netball is traditionally a noncontact sport in that you can’t tackle or physically take the ball from another player’s hands. But you can get so close to your opponent that you breathe the same air and tussles are inevitable when you both go up for the same ball.
It was this aspect that impressed Richard the most, apart from the Auckland grid, traditionally a rugby warm-up routine, that England used in their pre-match preparations. He was also staggered by the height of some of the women, who put Venus Williams to shame in the long limbs stakes.
‘I don’t know if I’d come again,’ was his honest appraisal, but he added: ‘I just don’t know enough about it to be able to talk about it without sounding like an idiot.’
Richard was definitely in the minority among the England supporters, but Jamaica have a genuine male following, proudly decked out in the green and gold colours of their island.
Netball will never become a sport that men will chat about over a pint in the pub, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
So, go on chaps, bite the bullet and watch 14 supreme athletes knock the hell out of each other. You might just enjoy it.
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-1152429/Well-hello-boys–Netball-courting-new-crowd-8217-s-bibs-gymslips.html#ixzz11lkMHG9m
Hello Netballers!
