Sunshine Girls hunt bronze against England
THE Sunshine Girls will attempt to save face with a bronze medal finish at the 19th Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India when they take on England in a repeat of the Melbourne third-place netball match-up today at the Thyagaraj Sports Complex.
England and Jamaica — ranked third and fourth respectively — can be considered as the two underachievers in the sport, having showed lots of promise over the years, but are yet to follow through with a major championship.
Both teams finished as runner-ups in their groups, but failed to get beyond the semi-finals stage of the competition — England losing to the Australian Diamonds and Jamaica to the New Zealand Silver Ferns.
England, who finished third four years ago in Melbourne, Australia, will go into today’s game with the edge after putting on a better show against the two Oceana titans at the Games.
They lost both matches played against the Ferns and the Diamonds by six-point margins, while the Sunshine Girls slumped to 14- and 16-point defeats in their encounters.
But, the Connie Francis-coached Girls, will take heart from the fact that they are entering the game with a better overall scoring percentage than the Maggie Jackson-coached English outfit and also boasting the tournament’s second most clinical shooter in Romelda Aiken.
At the end of the day, however, those records might just prove meaningless as both teams will take to the court seeking to settle unresolved issues from last month’s Sunshine Series, which ended in a 1-1 stalemate at the National Indoor Sports Centre.