Australia netball coach Stacey Marinkovich was satisfied with her team's strong performance in which they demolished minnows Zimbabwe 86-30 during their opening match of the World Cup in Cape Town.
The Australian Diamonds, who are among the favourites to win the tournament, showed no mercy as they convincingly dominated Zimbabwe in every quarter to make their intentions clear.
Speaking after the match, Marinkovich said they want to peak at the right time as the tournament gains momentum.
“We have been in such a bubble in our training environment just to get rhythm and understanding. We need to build combinations which is something we have been working on at training.”
Marinkovich added the other key area of focus for her is to try not to make too many changes.
“I want to keep the balance of the team so we peak at the right time, but we also need to sustain performances over multiple quarters. It is good to be able to put two line-ups in a match, but having said that, I don’t want to chop and change too much.
“We want some players to get the experience, but there will be times where we will try to change quarter by quarter or try to sustain the line-up for longer periods. There is a bit of putting the puzzles together, but I am happy with progress.”
In the other match played at 11am as part of the morning session, Uganda also started their campaign on a good footing by thrashing Singapore 79-37 to leave coach Fred Mugerwa happy.
“Whatever happened today [Friday] is in the past and we are going to focus on whatever is coming up next. One of the positives from this match is we managed to score goals, though not as perfect as we would have liked.
“After the first quarter, I expected the match to go beyond 80 points and we didn’t do it because of errors we made as a team, but we are going to rectify those mistakes in our next game.
“The [team] I assembled is new, but they played well and I expect a lot of improvement from them,” said Mugerwa.
The evening session will be headlined by the opening ceremony, which promises to thrill the crowd at 4pm, followed by the highlight of the day in the match between South Africa and Wales two hours later.
Also scheduled in the session are matches between England and Barbados, Jamaica and Sri Lanka and Malawi and Scotland to wrap up the opening day.
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