Networking

SUZANNE McFADDEN talks to two women who will spend 12 days in a glass box watching, hopefully, New Zealand beat the world.

Julie Coney has just stepped off the beaches of the Italian Riviera on her belated honeymoon.

Just as well she had her glorious holiday in the sun.

Coney now has 12 straight days of talking in a glass box, commentating the world netball championships in TV2's saturation coverage of the tournament in Christchurch.

Coney's European honeymoon lasted seven weeks, after meeting up with husband, Jeremy, in England. He'd been away from home for three months commentating on radio on the Black Caps' cricket tour.

The former New Zealand sports captains reckon they deserved the long break for their stints behind the microphone.

But Julie says she is raring to get yakking again on Wednesday night, when the Silver Ferns play the opening match of the world champs against Canada.

It is her job, she says, to "colour in the picture" drawn by co-commentator Jo Coleman. The pair have called games together for the past three years.

This will be Coney's fourth world championships - but in three different roles.

She played for the Ferns when they won the title in Glasgow in 1987. She remembers wearing her hair in two plaits every day of the tournament for good luck.

She was dropped from the New Zealand side three years later but led a tour group to the 1991 world champs when the Ferns lost the final to Australia by one goal.

In 1995 Coney commentated her first world championships but she doesn't have great memories of it.

"I was on a plane flying to England when New Zealand lost to Australia. I felt like telling the pilot to turn around and take me home again.

"This time I've got a good feeling about it. The fact that it's here in New Zealand, and this year looks as though we could do it."

TV2 will have two sessions of netball every day through until the final on October 2. All but one of the Silver Ferns' matches are live.

Coleman and Coney will fill one shift, usually the New Zealand game, with former Silver Ferns April Ieremia and Tanya Cox teaming up to call the other match of the day.

This will be the first world championship assignment for Coleman, whose day job is at TVNZ as head publicist for sport and TV2.

So does she feel like the odd-one-out in the quartet, the one without any international netball experience?

"Yeah, I would have loved to played for New Zealand but it just wasn't in the equation. But I've still played the game - I have since I was seven - and I know the game ... maybe not as well as Julie. But I'm offering the balance, the journalism side of it. There's room for both.

"Look at guys like Keith Quinn, Tony Johnson and Brendan Telfer. They didn't play for the All Blacks."

Coleman has copped flak for her commentary style.

"Everybody is going to have a bad day at the office. It's just such a public job - you can get hammered. I see my job as a narrator, adding a bit to the story that the pictures really tell.

"It's a buzz working with Julie. She's got experience coming out of her ears. People don't always like what we say ... but it's not our job to always say what some people want to hear."

Netball isn't always an easy game to talk about. More often than not these days, the Silver Ferns' games are tediously lopsided, unless they're playing the defending champions, the Aussies.

"Netball is so repetitive," says Coleman. "It's hard to keep it alive, especially when its a bad game and one side is running away with it. But I like telling people that that player teaches special-needs kids, or another went to school in Motueka."

Coney, while lying on the beaches of Greece and Italy, Coney considered whether to make these world championships her swansong after six years in netball fans' ears.

"I don't know what I'll do. Sometimes I think it was easier to commentate when I was a lot closer to the game. That's why I've kept playing for the Keas [former Ferns who play today's Ferns]. Yet in other ways, it's become easier as I've got used to the job.

"Sometimes I think it would be a good time to give up - in a world championship year. I've given a lot of my life to netball. But I love keeping in touch with the people in the game.

"I still enjoy going away for a girls' weekend."