ANZ Championship
Southern Steel 55
NSW Swifts 48
The Southern Steel beat the NSW Swifts in their final regular season match at Invercargill to keep their hopes of making the transtasman netball league playoffs firmly alive yesterday.
Their fate now rests on the final match of the round tomorrow night between fellow top four contenders the Queensland Firebirds and the West Coast Fever in Perth.
The Steel, on 16 points, have a positive goal difference of 17 after today's match. The Firebirds, on 14 points, have a plus eight difference going into tomorrow's match. They need to win - and by 10 goals.
The Steel picked up where they left off from last week's fine win over the Adelaide Thunderbirds, delivering another complete team performance. Goal attack Donna Wilkins was easily the star of the day with a 95 per cent success rate in her shooting, sinking 35 goals from 36 attempts.
Goal shoot Megan Dehn shot a fine 83 per cent with 19 from 23 but she made a bigger contribution through her finesse at creating space for Wilkins and her fluid combination with feeding star Adine Wilson.
If the Steel harbour any regrets from yesterday's match, they will look back on a brief flat patch in the third quarter in which they allowed the Swifts to cut a 10-goal margin back to six.
The Steel shot out to a 17-10 lead at the end of the first quarter and were never really seriously threatened by a Swifts side that conceded 17 turnovers to 10 in the game.
Shooters Catherine Cox and Susan Pratley were also off song, with shooting percentages in just the high 60s in the first half, while Wilkins and Dehn were hovering around the 90s.
Circle defenders Megan Hutton and Katrina Grant threw up a brick wall that Pratley and Cox found difficult to penetrate. Wing defence Wendy Telfer was another to shine, taking a number of intercepts to prevent the Swifts from building momentum, while Liana Barret-Chase had another energetic performance at centre, linking both ends of the court seamlessly.
Steel skipper Wilson said: "I don't think it was the tidiest game in the world but a win's a win and I hope that's enough to put us through to the top four. I think it [the pressure] did get to us a little bit as we got a little frazzled at times."
Meanwhile, the Melbourne Vixens scored a 41-goal win over the Central Pulse yesterday to keep their hopes of a home major semifinal alive.
The 80-39 win lifts them to a 12-1 win-loss record and - for now at least - top of the ANZ Championship ladder before next week's finals.
But the Vixens' fate will now depend on whether the Waikato/Bay of Plenty Magic can beat the third-placed Adelaide Thunderbirds in Adelaide today - and by how many goals.
Goal attack Donna Wilkins had a shooting success rate of 95 per cent. Photo / Getty Images
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