CLAIRE Brownie is under no illusions about how important this weekend’s World Cup qualifying tournament in Perth is.
The Scotland netball captain has been playing at the highest level for a decade, but there are few years that have been quite as important in her career as 2018 will be.
The Commonwealth Games are now less than three months away but for now, Brownie’s priority is making sure that her team secures qualification for the 2019 World Cup.
This evening, Scotland begin their World Cup qualifying tournament campaign against Wales before taking on Northern Ireland on Sunday.
Only two of the three teams will qualify for the tournament and with Northern Ireland ranked eight in the world, Wales ninth and Scotland eleventh, the Scots are the underdogs.
But Brownie is in confident mood. “I’m really looking forward to it – we’ve done a lot of hard work leading up to this and we’ve had a lot of pre-season games so I think we’re ready,” he said. “It’s always been a good rivalry between us and Northern Ireland and Wales so there’s going to be some very tough matches.
“Anyone can beat anyone this weekend, that’s the beauty of this tournament and with qualification for the World Cup being at stake, that obviously makes getting the win even more important. And we’re also looking to use these matches as an opportunity to show how good a team Scotland have become.”
Brownie, who captains the Scotland team, has every right to be confident. At Netball Europe last October, Scotland defeated Wales and lost by only one point to Northern Ireland, which is why Brownie is optimistic that her team can come out on top.
“I really do believe that if we bring our best game, we can beat anyone,” she said. “We’re in a really good place – we’ve got a real mix in our team in terms of experience, but the younger players have stepped up massively, especially in the last year and so things are looking very good.
“We’ve got so much strength-in-depth in our team and, if we play our best netball, I’m confident that we’ll come out the winners.”
Scotland have an extra boost courtesy of being on home soil. Tickets for the tournament sold out almost immediately and Brownie is sure that having the home crowd behind them will provide the extra push they need,
But she knows that the team cannot allow themselves to get too carried away with thoughts of getting to the World Cup. “I love playing at home – it’s the best thing,” she said. “Having a sold-out crowd for both our games is amazing. And the tickets selling out so quickly shows what’s happened to netball in this country in recent years and that’s so exciting.
“We can’t get away from the bigger picture as we all are aware that World Cup qualification is at stake and we know what we want the end result to be but when it comes to taking to the court, that’s when we’ll really be focusing on the processes and what we need to do to play well.
“It’s about our performances more than what anyone else does. We need to make sure that we keep to our Scotland style – we’ll want to set the tempo and control the game and if we do that, we should get the results we want.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here