Anna Rowberry: Slow start and dodgy calls leave New Zealand with nothing

COMMENT


This was a match of unforced errors and some pretty appalling umpiring, but I cannot in all honesty say the latter is why we lost the test and with it the series last night.

But I'd still have to say that I was pretty disgusted. I was sitting down near Irene and she was just getting clobbered.

It was nerve-racking watching Irene approach the hoop in the last seconds for a goal that would have levelled the scores - only to get penalised for stepping. This was a game where you could say: 'If only we'd done this...'

That was the story of the match really - we started slowly again and made too many unforced errors.

This was not as attractive a game as the second test because our attacking play simply did not flow as it did then. You'd have to say the Australians had a hand in that - we had to work a lot harder to get anywhere.

They shut us down and stemmed the flow and that first quarter was again a disappointing start for us - we were playing catch-up from then on.

Amigene Metcalfe was having her first start at wing attack in the first quarter and maybe that didn't help - but I don't want to make it sound as though I think that's the sole reason. We made too many mistakes.

I knew it would be a photo-finish in those last quarters and that it would be the side that made the fewest mistakes and which got the calls from the umpires that would prevail.

I guess we did a few things we shouldn't - and we paid for them.

However, on the bright side, I thought Jodie Te Huna was our stand-out performer of the series. She was probably our most solid player. She worked well with Irene and is a cool, unemotional player who has been on the bench for two years. But now, with Belinda Colling out, she has really grabbed her chance to show that she is a class player.

I think Liz Ellis was their player of the series and you have to say that the Aussies have really turned it round since we beat them 3-0 in July. It could have gone either way last night, but they have now been together longer - it was Norma Plummer's first game in July - and are more lethal as a result.

It's a shame that it wasn't a more attractive game - it was exciting because it was so close - but that's because both sides made the other work hard to find a way through. I thought Adine Wilson and Sheryl Scanlan played well and certainly added a bit of life and we really started to link properly with Irene.

But, overall, we lacked cohesion. There were too many mistakes and we should not have lost when we were two goals up with five minutes to go. All that's needed is to play safe and keep a cool head - easy to say but I have been out there plenty of times when the adrenalin just carries you away and you get a bad umpiring call and it all changes. That's what happened to us, I think.


- THE HERALD ON SUNDAY