48 hours: Ban the blokes from umpiring or there'll be deaths

There's really no easy way of starting this so let's get straight to the point: Blokes shouldn't be allowed to umpire netball tests.

If anyone needed final confirmation of this, they only had to tune into the netball on Saturday night, when two possibly sight-impaired fellas almost ruined one of the great transtasman showdowns.

The astonishing triumph of this event wasn't only that the two teams fought out a spell-binding test but that the capacity crowd didn't riot afterwards and string up Chris Campbell and Dalton Hines from the rafters.

Umpires? They looked incapable of managing a garage sale. They were so bad it was hard to put aside a nagging suspicion they were really a hoax; that the genuine umpires were somewhere out the back, hogtied and gagged.

People talk about the need for discipline in sport. Well, after Saturday night's umpiring effort, every player, team official and fan should be presented with a specially-cast medal, possibly inscribed with the message: "I went to the netball and didn't kill anyone."

These guys' calls were bad enough. They whistled for irrelevancies, penalised the wrong players for contact, exaggerated the held-ball rule and made basic errors with things like inbound possession.

But their non-calls were almost worse.

At both ends of the court, opposing players were closer to trampling each other than 0.9 of a metre apart and the defenders from each team were getting away with fouls that wouldn't have been allowed in basketball.

Put this in the book of most sexist quotes if you like, but when you get past all the philosophising, the idea of gender-equality in gender exclusive sport is just plain nonsense.

Like it or not, there's a natural order in life that doesn't include a couple of chaps umpiring netball at a level they could never aspire to play to, as much as they might've wanted.

Even putting aside the question of why on earth one of the brotherhood would want to excel in this type of specialist field, it's still a puzzle as to why the sisterhood would want them in the first place.

After all, netball's flagship vehicle is the Silver Ferns; an exclusively women's team who - through the deeds of generations of New Zealand women - have grown and evolved into a national sporting icon.

The Ferns' success is far more than simply a sporting triumph, it's a triumph for women's independence and identity, for hope and ambition and, not least of all, for recognition and image.

How important is it to our daughters and nieces that, after being bombarded by men's football, men's golf and men's cricket, they can watch an exclusively women's sport being taken seriously?

How important is it for them, after watching the world media fete sporting stars such as Tiger Woods, the All Blacks and Shane Warne, to see women not only playing in an all-female team environment, but officiating as well?

Netball might just be trying to be an equal-opportunity type of industry but if it considers the landscape of international rugby, soccer, NFL and league, it will see that there's no need.

All-male team sports have been refereed and umpired by males through the ages and, although some domestic organisations have occasionally dabbled in equal-opportunity, it's almost always ended in tears.

In fact, it wasn't that long ago that New Zealand Cricket appointed Canterbury woman Pat Carrick on the provincial umpiring panel, in what was a well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful move.

Carrick was a good person who knew her cricket but was manifestly out of her depth when it came to the Shell Series competition; her four seasons and 15 first-class appointments being remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Maybe it's time for netball administrators to accept a similar reality. As long as only women can qualify for the top teams as players, then only women should be allowed to qualify as umpires.

High point

Silver Fern Maria Tutaia's development in the face of some of the toughest defence she'll ever experience. Showed great courage and composure under fire, and better range than her more senior sidekick, Irene van Dyk.

Low point

The Breakers' third consecutive loss, this one to NBL lightweights West Sydney. Wollongong now loom tonight, after which they face a tough home game on Wednesday against Brisbane.