Pythons humbled by rampant Serpents

Every now and again, even the champion teams get humbled, and tonight that happened at the hands of a tenacious and brave Serpents team, playing a couple down due to impending nuptials this weekend (good luck Anna).

Behind closed doors (and even with them wide open), Coach Baron was very confident, after all, we hadn’t been beaten by the RC Serpents since 2013. Ryan’s Reserve International Netball Stadium was looking an absolute picture, the mercury sat at a perfect 17.2 degrees and the sun was setting over the greatest suburb in the world. The stage was set for the Pythons juggernaut to roll on. The girls like to keep their coach in the dark so around 3pm I get a message to let me know my country netballer with a huge ticker (Jen) and the Queen of the black eye and the Dare Iced Coffee (Laura) are both out.

Python’s shooter, Langerak points to the train tracks, Pythons are running right to left as I looked at the game. The opening whistle goes, we go out and precede to play our worst quarter of netball since we were languishing in the bottom half of the draw back in early 2013. Passes didn’t stick, balls were getting turned over off the centre pass, and we didn’t actually get it into the circle for a shot until 7 minutes into the quarter. Highlight of the quarter was a backwards pass from Maria to Jess that flew over the back line because Jess switched off and was checking out the play on the other court, I’m not sure she even saw it! Yet through some sheer miracle (and some Langerak guts), the Pythons closed out the quarter down by 5-4.

It had been the plan all week to get star GK Jessica Larritt into shooter for a quarter and I wasn’t about to be let the fact that we were being dominated all over the court get in the way of that!  Whilst she moved well and got into good positions, it wasn’t a great day at the office for Jess, shooting 0/2.

The Serpents kept on the full court pressure, forcing turnovers and errors, and I joke not, by half time I think the Pythons had managed to get penalised for everything there is to be penalised for in the game of netball. Holding the ball, stepping, intimidation, you name it we did it.  Add this to the bad passing and poor decision making, we went into the half time break down by 13-8.

I don’t really know what else to say about the last two quarters, so I won’t break them down play by play. We kept the game close in the 3rd, still losing the quarter by 7-5 and went into the 4th quarter with Amanda Parker, normally one of the most reliable players on the team, having not even taken a single shot. That was probably the key stat of the game really, with only one shooter putting up shots, the Serpents were just too good, and we were just too bad on the night.

Parker would go on to drop 1/1 in the final term in what ended up being her least productive outing for the Pythons since she joined back in early 2014.  A switch of the wings did nothing to stem the constant go-forward of the Serpents, closing out the final quarter 6-2.   Amanda Langerak shot 14 out of our 15 goals and played hard all night. Probably the one highlight in an otherwise very tough night for the RC Pythons girls.

Final score: 

15-26

What we learnt?