Diamonds Have Double Fever
WAIS and West Coast Fever netballers Caitlin Bassett and Susan Fuhrmann have been selected in the Australian Diamonds team for the World Championships in Singapore next month.
Both women have represented their country before with Bassett having four test caps, whilst Fuhrman with 24 appearances is a comparative veteran. Despite this, the Fever’s finest said it remains a tremendous honour.
“It’s been a goal for mine of a while to go to the World championships and I’ve been working pretty hard towards it,” Fuhrmann said.
“There is no higher honour than getting to represent your country, I’m so excited to wear the green and gold,” Bassett said.
The initial squad of 23-players was narrowed down to 12 following an intense training camp in Canberra that involved two training sessions a day, recovery sessions and team meetings.
“I’ve been to a few training camps before and I can easily say that the quality of players at this camp was far over and above anything we’ve had before,” Fuhrmann said.
Selecting 11 of Australia’s best players to miss out on the trip to Singapore is no doubt a tough job and one that Fuhrmann could empathise with.
“I think in general, everyone had such a great season in the ANZ championship so it makes the selectors’ job pretty tough and I’ll tell you what it’ll make for a fair bit of pressure for us out on the court as well,” The 24-year-old said.
Despite a disappointing season for the Fever, who finished second-bottom in the ANZ Championship ladder, Bassett can see some silver lining in the result.
“Yeah obviously we didn’t achieve what we wanted to at Fever from a team point of view, but to finish with such a high number of goals for the season meant the girls in our team were working overtime to get the ball down to me,” the 23-year-old sharpshooter said.
Fuhrmann said a poor start to the season hurt the Fever’s chances of rising up the ladder.
“It wasn’t a great year for us, we came close to a few of the top sides and put up some really good performances towards the end of the season,” The defender said.
“There will be some pretty big changeups in the club for next season and were really looking forward to moving forward instead of looking back.”
Despite Australia going to Singapore with an International Federation of Netball Associations’ ranking of no.2, Bassett is confident there will be no easy games.
“New Zealand, Jamaica and England are all going to be tough matches,” she said.
“You can’t rule out teams like Fiji, South Africa and Samoa either and there will be no easy wins at World Champs.”
Australia will be looking forward to a rematch with archrivals and no.1 ranked country New Zealand.
“The last time we faced the Silver Ferns (NZ) it went into double over time at the Commonwealth Games so there is going to be a lot of emotion in that game I think,” Bassett said.
The 2011 World Netball Championships begins on July 3rd.
– Beau Pearson