Dana Johannsen: Ferns can beat franchise failings

The Commonwealth Games gold medal is far from being in the bag for the Silver Ferns. File photo / Richard Robinson

Woefully lacking in the transtasman league, NZ still has every chance of pulling it together internationally.

According to the Aztec calendar it's about this time of year we all start panicking about the state of New Zealand netball.

With the Magic once again the only Kiwi side to scrape through to the transtasman league finals (barring any extreme scoreline blowouts this weekend on the scale of a Silver Ferns v Sri Lanka international) many fans are looking ahead to the international season with a sense of impending disaster. It's an understandable concern - watching Silver Fern-laden sides get trounced by Australian line-ups sometimes featuring players with immensely less experience doesn't inspire much hope. And yet previous seasons have shown us poor results in the ANZ Championship don't necessarily spell doom in the international arena (except for last season when the Ferns were pretty awful).

The Commonwealth Games gold medal is far from being in the bag for the Silver Ferns, but it would be premature to judge their campaign on this year's transtasman league results. The inability of the likes of the Mystics and the Pulse to force their way into the play-offs is a failing of those individual teams, not of New Zealand netball as a whole.

Throw the same players back into the Silver Ferns environment, with its strong coaching, management and team culture, and they look a very different unit.

The popular line for struggling franchises over the first six seasons in the league has been to point to a lack of depth or poor development pathways. The shrug-your-shoulders "there's not much we can do" approach has always seemed like a major cop-out but their complaints over the structure of New Zealand netball have been valid to a point.

This year we've seen franchises' leadership and high performance systems seriously exposed and they have nowhere to look but inward. The Pulse and Mystics had impressive depth and still failed to deliver.

Something is clearly rotten in the Mystics' team culture. Although they went some small way in restoring some pride with a comprehensive win over the Fever on Monday, the Mystics haven't looked a cohesive team unit on or off the court. Rumours of problems in the franchise's front office further paint a picture of a club in turmoil.

The shortcomings in the Pulse system were brutally exposed in their 27-goal hammering at the hands of the Firebirds over the weekend. They looked hopelessly underprepared, having failed to develop an effective game plan against the Australian sides. And when plan A inevitably failed, the only direction the players appeared to be getting from the sideline was "just hold on to the ball".

If this season has revealed any element Netball New Zealand should be concerned about, it is the lack of depth in the coaching stocks. With Tactix coach Leigh Gibbs stepping down at the end of the season, and Robyn Broughton's future at the Pulse unclear, there doesn't appear to be many obvious candidates capable of stepping in and leading a high performance programme. That is something for the franchises to grapple with in the offseason.

In the meantime, fear not Ferns fans. The sky is not falling - it is merely a few boulder-sized acorns, 'tis all.