D'Arcy Waldegrave: Sportstalk host on the Silver Ferns beating the Diamonds in first Constellation Cup match

Sport with Generate. Celebrating great performances in sport and KiwiSaver accounts. Darcy Watergrave, Sports Talk Coasters with us. Hello, Darcy. Kelly, Miss

Jackson, she is for real.

You're lame, eh? Yeah. What a dad. I'm a dad. It's a dad joke. That's what

we do, right? She was awesome. Yeah. Unbelievable. I wouldn't say unbelievable because I saw it in my own eyes. So it was very believable watching what they did. But the Ferns, they crushed it right from the get-go. Grace Wickie. what was it, 39 from 40 or 40

from 41? Yeah,

astonishing, and played so many minutes, and they put their foot on the throat, and they left it there. They got off to a great start, it carried on in the second. By the time the Diamonds actually woke up, too late. They beat them, I think, was it 17-11, I think, in the fourth quarter, but by that stage, it was just too little too late. They had nothing there, so... But we are at home. It is at Spark. We do tend to get off to good starts. The proof of the pudding is when they eat the rest of the series. And can that actually happen?

I got thinking, though, about the reason the Silver Ferns are playing at the level that they are is because so many of them are now playing in the Australian competition. In the Australian

competition, yeah.

So then you've got the conundrum. Do you want them to stop playing in the Australian competition and come back and play in the Mowbray competition? Because they may lose the Silver Ferns edge, right? You've got to

name that, has it? The Mowbray competition. That's what it is.

So actually what you should do is you should stagger the windows, shouldn't you? So that you've got the Silver Ferns can go and play in the Australian competition, keep the levels up, come play in the Mowbray competition, lift the other domestic players up and then play for the Silver Ferns. The

beauty of this is it's new, and there are no rules around it. And Netball New Zealand, hopefully, I'd like to think, have learned from the issues they've had previously, and they will put something in place for the benefit of the players, the benefit of the game, for the benefit of the fans, and maybe even the benefit of Australia. You don't know. I don't know how long before they start pushing back and going, listen, we can't have you playing in our competition. It bites us in the backside. But you know the beauty of what happened last night is God, do you actually talk netball as opposed to boardroom shenanigans? Yeah, that's a good point. So that is great because look at them play. Look at the vibrancy, the enthusiasm, the joy they play with. It's hard not to watch, in all honesty. And that's saying something because I watch sport all weekend in between broadcasting all weekend.

A little bit sorry for the Australians because they took smacking for us in the rugby and in the netball.

Yeah, but they got their revenge last night when the White Ferns stumbled again for the 14th consecutive time against their woman's counterpart. So they got their beans. But I tell you what, the White Ferns, though, they did go off to a great start. Bree Elling, who we're going to have on the show later on today, she got off to a good start, got a