Ak Fauzi Pg Salleh
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN
THE national netball coach Thilaka Jinadasa (pic) believes that consistency is the key to success for their campaign this year.
The Royal Bees will face Sri Lanka's Presbyterian Girls School in their fifth of six proposed friendly series today (4-6pm) and Jinadasa is expecting a more focused and consistent play from her charges.
"Consistency is very important in every game, I am quite happy with the players but I need them to be consistent throughout while playing in high intensity,” said Jinadasa in an interview with BruSports.
“Winning (against Presbyterian Girls Schoo) is not a problem in this series, I am more concerned about how do we organise and adapt to every situation in the game.
“This series is mostly about how we stay calm on the court when we play against new oppositions and also how to adapt and strategise to remain ahead in the game,” she added.
“We need to get used to different oppositions, and in this case this school team is not as strong but they play a very fast paced game and it gives us a different kind of threats.
“Exposure games are not about winning, it is more about how do we win the game and how do we overcome every situation and apply our strategies, and for me it is also an opportunity to test the new players who most of them are getting their first experience playing against international opposition,” continued the Sri Lankan.
Jinadasa added that they have been working on their new ball passing strategy and are applying it in the friendly series.
“We are now focusing on playing straight formation and go for the front cut and just continue moving forward to avoid being intercepted," she said.
"If we go to international or regional tournaments, even if we play against teams like Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, they are all bigger and taller physically than our players, so the past month we have been working a lot on our short and straight passes instead of diagonal and cross passes.
“When we played in Sabah for the friendlies, we tend to do a lot of cross and back passes but it didn’t work out for us as the opponents were bigger and taller...since then I have been trying to overcome the problem and introduced the straight passes…so one of the objectives of this series is also to work on these areas,” concluded Jinadasa.
