Battle of top and bottom takes centre stage at Netball Cup

The league leaders, who play a double header on Saturday, will be wary of being complacent in their second match of the day when they face the North West Flames who lost to them by just one goal in when they met in Round One.

The Jaguars beat the Aloes by a 10 goal margin in their Round one match and will be confident of taking all the points.

The second-placed Free State Crinums will also want to extend the gap between themselves and the chasing pack and face a banana peel encounter against the Flames on Saturday and the Fireballs on Sunday. Any slip and the Crinums will find themselves locked in a titanic struggle with at least two other teams for a place in the Division One final.

The Flames know that they need to find the cutting edge, having lost three of their four matches by a single goal. They will be desperate for maximum points to give themselves a platform to lay down a marker as title challengers but they face the leagues’ two strongest teams in the Jaguars and the Crinums.

Meanwhile the Aloes, who are wondering what they have to do to get a win, will not have it easy when they face both Gauteng teams. The Aloes occupy last place on the Division One log, and are yet to register a win.

On Sunday they face third-placed Golden Fireballs who showed signs of finding their form when they beat the North West Flames last week. With four games to go it is now or never for the Aloes if they want to make it into the finals and their next two game are must-win encounters.

In the Division Two match of the weekend, the Southern Stings face much stiffer contest in the second match of the day against the Kingdom Stars. The KwaZulu Natal team will want to exact revenge on the Cape Town-based team after going down to them in Round One. and know that they must win this one if they have any hopes winning the division and a place in the battle for promotion.

By the time that game starts, the Stings will likely have inflicted another crushing performance against the Sunbirds whom they beat by more than 57 points in round one.

In the other potentially mouth-watering encounter the Stars come up against the Northern Cape Diamonds who could still play kingmaker in the division. They have played some very good netball so far and will want to build on their performance in round 1.

For the Sunbirds and Limpopo Baobabs it will be another weekend of building as they look to offset another round of heavy defeats. The two teams do face each other, however, which will make the weekend considerably brighter for at least one of them – with the Baobabs winning the first round encounter convincingly.

– Sapa