Netball: Lofty Fijian forces way into Silver Ferns squad

By SUZANNE MCFADDEN

As a little girl running madly on Fijian netball courts of dust and grass, Villimaina Davu told anyone who would listen she would be the best netballer her country had ever seen.

She lived up to her promise - except that today she is a Silver Fern.

The grinning goal-keep, who left Fiji this year to further her netball dreams, is the new cap in a New Zealand side turned on their heads for next month's tour to South Africa.

Anna Rowberry is out of the line-up for the first time in five years, and former captain Belinda Colling is back in, against expectations.

Sheryl Clarke, four years ago the teenage defence sensation who never won a cap, has been recalled, as has Waikato policewoman and midcourter Jenny-May Coffin.

And now there are two foreign internationals in the mix, with Davu joining former South African shooter Irene van Dyk. This time last year they were both playing against New Zealand.

Davu, now 23, first played for Fiji as a 15-year-old.

By then she had already told her father, a forestry worker in Pacific Harbour, that she would be the best netballer in Fiji.

"Now he says, 'Shorty you're quite good.' And I say, 'I told you so,"' laughed Davu, who is 1.90m (6ft 3in). "When I was a kid I read about New Zealand and Australian players and I wished I was one of them."

She came to the world championships in Christchurch last year, and fell in love with New Zealand netball.

"When I got here I wished someone would see me from the stands, grab me and take me away," she said.

And so it happened. She returned this year to play for the Canterbury Flames in the Coca-Cola Cup and stayed. During the Fiji coup, she declared herself unavailable for her home side, and soon after became available for her adopted home.

Silver Ferns coach Yvonne Willering was impressed with how Davu had smoothed her rough edges at last weekend's training camp.

"She's so committed - she goes for every ball," she said.

Colling was another who showed the necessary commitment at the camp, and earned her way back into the side.

It had been a gloomy netball year for the goal-attack, plagued by injury, poor form and a commitment to play basketball at the Olympics.

Just when it seemed her international netball days were over, Willering invited her to the camp when her Tall Ferns team-mate Donna Loffhagen pulled out.

"It was hard for Belinda - she had two days to prove herself where everyone else had the whole season," Willering said. "But she did enough to warrant her place."

But not so Rowberry, the Otago wing-attack who made the Ferns as a teenager for the 1995 world championships and has not missed a tour since.

The writing seemed on the wall for Rowberry in the last international series, when she lost her place in the starting lineup to Temepara George.

Willering said George and Coffin had simply outshone Rowberry at the trial.

Rowberry will head a New Zealand A side who will play three matches against the Ferns in Auckland before they leave for South Africa in mid-November to play the home side and Australia.

New Zealand: Irene van Dyk, Tania Nicholson, Belinda Colling, Adine Harper, Jenny-May Coffin, Temepara George, Lesley Nicol, Sheryl Clarke, Anna Veronese, Bernice Mene (capt), Linda Vagana, Villimaina Davu.