Harcourts favoured to score 1000 goals

The odds are heavily in favour of Harcourts achieving a remarkable 1000 goals in Netball Wairarapa premier one competition matches this season.
They have already totalled 922 in just 13 games and with at least two remaining to complete their season the four figure mark seems well within their reach.
That despite them having a nil return in one match when Wairarapa College defaulted to them.
If any further evidence was required of the dominance of Harcourts in premier one play it came at the Genesis Recreation Centre on Monday night when they walloped the closest team to them on the points ladder, Kuranui College, 86-27.
Kuranui did have two of their regular players missing and with Harcourts picking up their usual high number of tips and intercepts they were always on the back foot.
Harcourts coach Kelly Sargent was still impressed, however, by the accuracy of the Kuranui shooters Alana Strange and Waimarama Phillips who coped well with the sustained pressure put on them by the Harcourts defence.
"To be honest we set ourselves a target of restricting them to a certain number of goals and they got a lot more than that," Sargent said. "Sure they were beaten by a big score but they didn't give up."
Sargent considers self belief has been a huge part of the Harcourts success story this season with the players backing their experience and skill to give them a decided advantage over their opposition.
"I know it sounds like we are on some sort of ego trip but we go out there knowing we should win," she said.
"And we don't let the score dictate how we play, we're always aiming to win by as much as we can."
Sargent also sees the evenness in quality between the 12 players in the Harcourts squad as a major asset with changes in both position and personnel able to be made without the worry of adversely affecting their performance.
"The biggest headache is deciding who to start with, whoever we put on can be relied on to do a good job," she said.
A testimony to their playing strength is that with outstanding centre Katie Wyeth and Sargent (goal shoot or goal attack) herself also turning out for second-placed Maoribank in the Hutt Valley competition they have sometimes struggled to make the local games yet Harcourts have continued to win by big scores, and even the absence of key defender Sarah Brooking for the remainder of the season is not seen as a problem. "It's a huge plus to have that sort of depth, really huge," Sargent said.
The consistently big winning margins produced by Harcourts have, of course, raised the question of whether some opposition teams have simply gone through the motions against them because they considered victory beyond their capabilities
Sargent admits that "very probably" could be the case but she doesn't need reminding of what happened last year when Harcourts were clearly the best team in preliminary round play but were deservedly well beaten by St Matthew's College in the grand final.
"We weren't in the right sort of mindset then and we don't want that to happen again, we are totally focused to going all the way this time," she said.
"We just have to worry about ourselves, not how the opposition are approaching things."
Indications are that when the top four playoffs in the premier one series get under way on September 6 Harcourts will play Kuranui with the winner of that game going straight through to the final.
And under the repechage system the loser will get a second bite off the cheery by playing off with the winner of a match between the third and fourth seeds-Sports Arena Carterton and Gladstone All Blacks- to decide the other finalist.
Gladstone All Blacks were actually also in action at the Genesis Recreation Centre on Monday night and they cemented their top four berth with a 39-28 win over Carterton Red.