Jamaica just short again in World Netball

Congratulations to the Jamaican netball team who celebrated their country’s 61st independence anniversary by placing third in the 2023 World Netball Championships which ended recently.

After heading their two group stages, including an impressive win over 2019 champions New Zealand, the “Sunshine Girls” fell agonizingly short to eventual champions Australia in the semi-final encounter. It was a disappointing result just as the Jamaicans were looking forward to their first ever world championship, though it is the fourth time that the Jamaicans have finished in that position.

Still, the team could feel pride in its showing, the Australia loss being their only such one. Indeed, Jamaica proved to be an oasis in the desert where Caribbean performances were concerned. Former Caribbean champions and indeed, joint world champions in 1979, Trinidad and Tobago, finished a lowly 12th place with Barbados two places below. By contrast African teams continued to show improvement with host team South Africa finishing fifth and Uganda and Malawi also ahead of the non-Jamaican teams from the Caribbean.

The results provide an opportunity for Caribbean netball to reassess its place in the game and thus plan for the future. When the World Championships were first played in England in 1963, netball was by far the leading female sport in the region. In the Caribbean, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago were the leaders, and could you guess who challenged them? It was St Vincent and the Grenadines, the leading team in the Eastern Caribbean, right up there with the Big Two and providing players of the calibre of the late Peggy Ince-Hull and Urel Campbell for the West Indies team which competed in that year.

T&T went on to even become joint world champions in 1979 but has steadily declined since then, as has, generally the sport in the region. It raises serious question for the future of the sport in the region and indeed the whole world.