Norma Plummer. Photo / Martin Sykes
Australian coach Norma Plummer has slammed a scheduling clash that has the 2015 world championships begin quickly after the end of that season's transtasman league.
"You don't see Robbie Deans running with the Wallabies for four days and then playing the World Cup, and neither is Graham Henry. If you
look at it from that point of view, I don't think it's a suitable time line," she said.
ANZ Championships organisers will again be forced to do some creative scheduling in 2015 after Netball Australia yesterday announced the 14th world tournament would be held in Sydney from August 9-16, 2015.
After a schedule conflict this year, transtasman league officials had been petitioning IFNA for a change of dates for future tournaments.
The international body agreed to relax its rules to allow Australia to host the tournament next month, but IFNA president Molly Rhone said they were not prepared to budge any further.
"We actually state in our charter that it should be in July," she said.
Rhone believes with test ranking points at stake, there needs to be a clear international window. She said professional leagues needed to fit around the international season and not the other way around.
But an eight-day tournament is more movable than a 17-week competition - as is the case with the ANZ Championships.
"We did a survey around the world, and we found that a lot of players are in school or universities, so for the majority of our members we found that July was a good time," said Rhone.
Plummer believes the world tournament should be held at the end of the year, as it was in 2007, when New Zealand stepped in at the last minute to stage the event after Fiji were stripped of the hosting rights following a coup.
"If all was fair and equal, your national coaches would have time to work with their teams. When we played in 2007 and we had to go New Zealand because of the Fiji issue, it was in November. And actually it was fantastic. We had all finished our [domestic competitions] and I had five four-day camps."
This time around Plummer and her NZ counterpart Ruth Aitken had just five weeks to prepare for the sport's pinnacle event, despite the start of the transtasman league being pushed back to mid-February.
