The Gold Round opened on Friday night with the West Coast Warriors defeating the Western Roar 69-53 at the Gold Netball Centre.
The 16-goal margin was the closet a team has reached against the reigning GIG WANL premiers, except for their only loss to East Freo Sharks.
A game full of momentum swings; every time Warriors looked to be pulling away Roar came back fighting with shooter Tess Gee-Cransberg scoring 25 for the night, but true to form Donnell Wallam helped Warriors stay ahead scoring 58 goals at 92 per cent.
Both teams were victim to their own mistakes on court. The Warriors holding the ball from pressure and Roar’s passing not strong enough as it was intercepted.
Warriors coach Lorraine Ward said her team can take away some positives including grinding out the game despite not playing their best brand of netball.
“It took us three quarters of the game to get some rhythm, and that’s a credit to Roar as well. I kind of felt we weren’t ready in our warm-up; we just didn’t look as ‘on’ as we normally are.” Ward said.
Ward thought the turning point in the third quarter was when her side woke up and fought hard as a team.
“It’s quite hard to mentally stay focused when our scores have been quite big, you can slip into complacency without realising you are doing it and I think there was a little bit of that coming in.” She said.
Roar goalkeeper Annabel Saggers impressed with her maintained composure up against dominant shooter Wallam, jumping high all game to grab herself some intercepts.
Roar coach Dylan McPherson was proud of his young team’s effort, putting up a strong fight in the first three quarters and constantly improving every time they meet the reigning premiers.
“The oldest player in our defensive area was 21 so we’re doing some pretty good stuff, and Sophia Lamers came on and she’s only 18 and did a great job on Steph Cooper,” he said.
McPherson thought his side dropped the last five minutes of every quarter with decision-making errors that let Warriors get a little run on them.
“I think every time we play them we learn something new about ourselves and how to beat them and we got 10 goals closer than we were last time, hopefully next time we get 10 goals closer,” McPherson said.
