Triple treat for NZ in netball, league and hockey

Black Stick Meredith Orr. Picture / Richard Robinson

Here are three fun things to do on a weekend: take the kids for a walk on a beach at sunset; win Lotto; and beat Australians at sport.

Twice. In less than a day. Now you're talking.

I know Australians reckon we sometimes go a bit too batty about duffing up our nearest and dearest. To be fair, often they've got a point. Still, this wasn't a bad double foot trip, the netball and the hockey.

Throw in the Kiwis blowing Great Britain aside 42-26 to sit top of the league Tri-Nations in London yesterday, and it's been a top weekend.

Back to the Aussies. Consider this from Black Sticks captain Suzie Muirhead, whose team toppled Australia 1-0 in the opening match of their three-game World Cup qualifying series at Auckland's Lloyd Elsmore Park yesterday.

It hasn't happened since July 2000. She took her team to watch the Silver Ferns give the Aussies a towelling at Trusts Stadium in Waitakere on Saturday night.

"It was nice to see Australia go down in a flaming heap," Muirhead said. "They gave them a real bath."

Too right they did, and Muirhead admitted it helped give the Black Sticks a little boost ahead of their clash at Lloyd Elsmore Park yesterday.

Twenty games without a win? About time something was done about that, was the gist of the New Zealanders' thinking and Meredith Orr's full-length dive to deflect a Lizzy Igasan drive into the Australian net early in the second half was enough to do the trick.

It was also a special way for 16-year-old Whangarei Girls High pupil Charlotte Harrison to become the youngest women's Black Stick international.

She had her personal fan club at one end of the ground. Had Australian goalkeeper Rachel Imison not got a fat mitt in the way with a fine reflex movement, Harrison would have scored with just her second touch.

"I was really nervous, but I think I did all right," Harrison said. She did.

As for the netball, it's simple: the Silver Ferns played well, the Australians were dreadful. It was a 25-goal shellacking, New Zealand's biggest win over their toughest rivals in 67 years.

It was richly deserved and despite coach Ruth Aitken's understandable protestations that it's too early to be shouting the odds - "one snapshot in time", she called it, which sounds like it should be in a song - there was a distinct thread of confidence running through New Zealand's game.

That's a far cry from where the invariably self-assured Australians are right now.

Their shooters would have missed the side of a house, the midcourt was a clear second and they haven't found a way to stop the ball getting to Irene van Dyk.

As for "Bluey" McClennan and his boys, they overcame travel demands, the Lesley Vainikolo disruption, some oddball behaviour from British coach Brian Noble and the world's smallest in-goals to score an impressive seven-tries-to-four win.

Sixteen points up at halftime, they let their guard down - again - after the break, before easing clear at the end.

And the quote of the weekend? Here's the loquacious "Bluey' explaining the desire to be expansive even in the dying moments when tight and steady was the safer option: "We scratch where it itches a bit".