Kopua primed for final round assault
Press Release May 29, 2014
What’s done is done and all Kia Magic captain Casey Kopua wants now is a decent win over the Queensland Firebirds in last round ANZ Championship netball action in Hamilton on Monday.
Dropping out of the top two for the first time this season after last week’s loss to the NSW Swifts, Magic now trail the Firebirds in fourth spot on goal differential with this weekend’s last round of the regular season set to determine the final order for the Finals Series.
With Magic having all but sealed a record seventh successive Finals Series position, the only team to achieve this, Kopua is not interested in what happens with other results this weekend. Of more importance, is regaining winning momentum ahead of the play-offs.
``That’s exactly what we need,’’ Kopua said. ``We can’t sit back and say, `I wish we’d done that’, because at the end of the day we didn’t do it, so we can’t change it but we can change what we can do in the future and for this game.
``It’s just trying to make sure we don’t do the same thing every week otherwise although it sounds cheesy, we’ll end up with the same result. It’s making sure you do what you need to do individually but as a team as well for your performance on the day.’’
They have a tough assignment against the in-form Firebirds, who come into the match on the back of a five-match winning streak and who have gone from strength-to-strength in the second half of the season.
``They always put out a good performance,’’ Kopua said of her upcoming opponents.
``For us, it’s just having all our seven players sticking together, connecting and we all have to bring our A game, we can’t have one player going missing.
``They’re coming into our home, our stadium and we need to make it feel like that.’’
Kopua acknowledges Magic have experienced some wobbles in the latter half of the season which she attributes partly to teams lifting their intensity in the run to the play-offs while they have also become more of a target after their near-seamless start to the campaign.
``We started with a bang and were great all the way up until our bye (round seven, halfway point of the season),’’ she said.
``At that point people didn’t really know what to expect from us, we didn’t know what to expect from ourselves. We certainly haven’t taken the foot off the pedal but things just aren’t going as smoothly and we’ve had our ups and downs towards the end of the season.
``We started out with the intensity and we still have that, it’s just the consistency of that intensity has dropped for us and everybody else has been playing that finals-type netball.’’
With nine new faces and a new coaching staff on board, Kopua, who has been a standout presence both on and off the court, is genuinely chuffed at where this team has come from after largely being written off pre-season, and in becoming the only New Zealand team to make the Finals Series.
``I would like to hear from those people that wrote us off at the beginning of the season and see what they’ve got to say now,’’ she said. ``For us, we had our goals to get to that top four and it’s been about all 12 players getting over that line together as the Magic team.
``The group of girls that we do have certainly want to improve and they want to do anything possible for us to win. That’s something that people don’t see behind the scenes, the intensity, the heart and the harsh words that we show in training. We have come a long way and we can take confidence from that.’’
Jane Hunt
Kia Magic media liaison
Ph: 021-107-0287
