Netball: Anti-Caribbean bias by umpires alleged

By Richard Boock

CHRISTCHURCH - Molly Rhone yesterday used the great West Indian cricket team of the 1980s to help to illustrate an alleged bias against Caribbean players at the world netball championships.

Rhone, the Jamaican president, joined forces with fellow delegate Yvette Smith and Barbados spokeswoman Annette Beckett to face what will surely be the biggest press conference of the championships, convened after a fiery pool match between Australia and Jamaica and subsequent accusations of biased umpiring.

Rhone told a packed news conference she wanted to make public her concerns about the objectivity of both the tournament umpires and media coverage, which she said was doing nothing for the image of netball in the Caribbean and was fundamentally unfair.

As the fallout continued from Saturday's donnybrook, when Jamaican wing-attack Sharon Wiles was sinbinned during a game which had more than a hint of a free-for-all about it, Rhone said she could not help but think of the problems encountered by the 1980s West Indian cricket team when they boasted the most feared pace attack in the world.

Cricket's governing body introduced over-rate quotas in a bid to counter that West Indian side's fast bowling strength and Rhone suspects Caribbean netball teams are facing similar injustices at the hands of rulemakers and whistle-blowers.

"We've reached a stage where the match officials are umpiring our style, rather than just applying the rules to both teams," Rhone said yesterday. "It's the West Indian cricket wrangle all over again, where you're penalised for playing a certain type of game, rather than breaking the rules."

At the heart of Rhone's concerns was an impression that Caribbean sides were attracting more umpire scrutiny than other teams at the championships, and that they were coming up against a concerted effort to make their style conform to everyone else's.

She refused to concede the problems were race-based, despite the fact that the loudest concerns have been raised by two white Australian coaches, two white Australian players, and two white umpires. Instead, she preferred to call the problem a mind-set, and a resistance to change.

"We get the feeling here in Christchurch that to be different is to be incorrect. It's demoralising for us and I'm sure it's doing nothing for the game back home. There seems to be a negative connotation to the word 'physical' over here, one that we're completely unfamiliar with.

"Netball's a physical game and don't let anyone say otherwise. That the fittest teams often win demonstrates just how physical it gets. We condemn unfair play as much as the next side but there's always a degree of contact, and it's never coming from just one team."