Netball: Ferns all ready for business

Silver Ferns coach Ruth Aitken. Photo / Getty Images

The Silver Ferns will waste little time in getting down to business in Singapore today as stage three of their abbreviated build-up to world championships begins.

The Ferns touched down in Singapore last night and have just six days to acclimatise and finetune their combinations before they hit the court in their opening pool play match against Fiji on Monday.

It marks the final phase of the Ferns' preparations for the event, squeezing in a two-test series against Australia this month and a three-day camp in Auckland last week.

The condensed build-up was brought about as a result of the transtasman league season being shoehorned in to the first half of the year after the International Federation of Netball Associations (IFNA) refused to budge from its traditional July world tournament date.

Ferns coach Ruth Aitken said the three-week build-up to the sport's pinnacle event was always going to be a challenging proposition, which is why the management team made the deliberate decision to link last year's Commonwealth Games campaign with the world championships.

Since 2009 the focus has been on building from one campaign to the next, with the goal being G2: back-to-back gold medals.

"[The build-up] has been very jam-packed I have to say, so it is pressure-cooker. But that for us is part of the reason why we did want a settled group that was going forward and why we phrased the whole 'G2', so we were building from one to another," said Aitken.

So while from the public's perspective there has been a short lead-in time to the tournament, for Silver Ferns shooter Maria Tutaia the world championships is the culmination of years of hard work.

The long-bomb specialist said the team head to Singapore feeling confident they have done the work.

"We've been training for this for so long - we've been working towards the world championships for over two and a half years, so we're ready for it."

The New Zealand side will play warm-up matches this week against Singapore, Malawi and Barbados before their opening game on Monday.

The Silver Ferns' pool opponents are Fiji, ranked fifth in the world, Wales (14th) and Trinidad and Tobago (8th) - all of which the New Zealand side are expected to easily account for, even with liberal rotation of the bench.

Realistically, the Ferns' first real challenge won't come until the semifinals, where they are expected to meet Sue Hawkins' English side.

But Tutaia insists there is no danger of her side losing focus and letting let their minds wander to the pointy end of the tournament.

She said there were plenty of objectives the Ferns needed to tick off in the early rounds to ensure they were playing at their best come finals time.

"We can never get too far ahead of ourselves, playing in a tournament is tough because you need to be able to focus on each individual game and worry about the next one when it comes, complacency can be a killer at tournaments," she said.

"You've got to be there mentally and physically every day."

Aitken said the focus for their pool play matches would be about sharing the workload to keep players fresh for the later rounds.

"We certainly will be playing all 12 over the three days, it's really important that everyone gets a taste before we get to the business end."