Bongi Msomi, the captain of the South African netball side, said that the Proteas women’s cricket team’s success was the driving force for her own team.
FILE: SPAR Proteas Netball captain Bongi Msomi. Picture: @Netball_SA/Twitter
JOHANNESBURG – There are just over five weeks to go until the start of the Netball World Cup in Cape Town.
The Proteas players who have been selected still have Telkom Netball League matches to play over the next few weeks. Captain Bongi Msomi dismissed suggestions that they should be wrapped up in cotton wool until next month’s tournament and said that they all needed to be playing competitive matches to keep them sharp.
She said that they were actually in more or less the same position as other top countries, such as New Zealand and Australia, who still had league matches on the go this month.
Msomi cleared up the issue of Norma Plummer being at home in Australia instead of being in South Africa to work with the team. Msomi said that Plummer communicates with the players regularly and wouldn’t have had an opportunity to train with her whole squad.
“Either way, even if she was here, this time is purely for the TNL, which is our highest level of competition in the country. It’s really just the time for our coaches in provinces [to work with us] and if she [Plummer] was here, she wouldn’t be able to work with us,” said Msomi.
Msomi will be playing in her fourth World Cup tournament. She was part of the Proteas teams that finished fifth in 2011 and 2015 as well as the fourth-placed team in 2019. This time around, she hopes to emulate the Proteas women’s cricket team who made the final of the T20 World Cup on home soil in February. She said that their success was the driving force for her own team.
“It is a massive motivation. They really did well, everyone was following and supporting them. I think the more we have women is sports stepping up and showing that they have the potential to be the best, it helps all of us and not just a specific sporting code,” Msomi said.
The captain hopes that the enduring legacy of the World Cup in South Africa will be raising the profile of the sport in the country.
“We look at long-term as well. This World cup is going to be such a positive influence in terms of how netball is looked at in the future. With us being in this space, at this time, I think it’s important that we take it seriously,” Msomi said.
The Netball World Cup will begin on 28 July. South Africa’s first pool game is against Wales on the opening day. That will be followed by fixtures against Sri Lanka on 29 July and Commonwealth Games silver medalists, Jamaica, on 30 July.
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