Netball: Superleague kicks off with largest ever event on Super Saturday

Larger venues and arrival of overseas signings all point to a brighter future

Former England captain Pamela Cookey is excited by the changes taking place in netball here (Getty)

The crowd in Birmingham’s Genting Arena are watching eight caped figures cavort around the court as superhero theme songs are pumped out over the PA system. This is netball but not as those with memories of gymslip days on chilly schoolyards might know it. As the song from the 1970s TV show Wonder Woman comes on, it seems a fitting backing track for a milestone day in the growth of a sport played weekly by more than 150,000 females aged 16 or over in this country.

It is Super Saturday, the biggest spectator event in the history of English club netball, with 7,621 spectators – more than at two of the day’s FA Cup fourth-round ties – gathering to watch the four back-to-back matches that kick off the Superleague season.

For the first time, the league’s eight teams are all in action under the same roof and for Pamela Cookey, the former England captain, it is something to savour. “It has come a long way from when I first started playing,” she says. “Now it is on TV, in newspapers and we’re filling out stadiums.”

For England Netball, Saturday’s event was the latest in a drive to take the club game out of sports halls and into bigger venues. If there was a 16,000 aggregate attendance for England’s three-match series against Australia last month, for Joanna Adams, the CEO of Netball England, it is the figures at certain Superleague games which bolster her optimism. There were nearly 6,000 at the Copper Box in the Olympic Park for a “normal mid-season league game” between Hertfordshire Mavericks and Surrey Storm last March. The Copper Box sold out again for the Grand Final last May, before which more than 4,000 had watched the Manchester Arena semi-final between Manchester Thunder and the Mavericks.

“We know if we can move our clubs into bigger arenas, there is a bigger audience there for netball,” says Adams. “I was the commercial director for the football Conference – and if Conference clubs could have got that sort of attendance, they would have been thrilled.”

Another significant factor in the league’s growth is the influx of overseas imports, such as South Africa defender Karla Mostert at Team Bath, Trinidad and Tobago shooter Sammy Wallace at the Mavericks and Uganda shooter Peace Proscovia at Loughborough Lightning.

For Cookey, this highlights the greater depth of talent now found in an increasingly competitive Superleague. “To have internationals wanting to come and play in our league is phenomenal,” she says.

Eboni Beckford-Chambers, captain of Team Bath, echoes this view. She has just returned from four years in the professional ANZ Championship, the tournament that remains the benchmark. “Australia and New Zealand are No 1 and No 2 in the world, so every weekend you are playing against the world’s best,” she says. “Over here, the standard is definitely rising. The league has attracted so many global imports and there are at least six strong teams on paper.”

The new season should bring a more attractive spectacle, too, with law changes meaning a faster game. This certainly applied to Saturday’s last match, when reigning champions the Storm were undone by a superb late comeback by Bath. England Netball has just embarked on a new three-year Superleague sponsorship deal with Vitality which will yield £220,000 in its first year. Looking ahead, Adams has hopes of an eventual rights package for television coverage, with Sky currently paying the production costs but no fee. Another ambition is for a professional league, though the first step could well be a move to cricket-style central contracts for England squad players.

In the meantime, Adams is confident the fans – predominantly female – will keep coming. “The social impact netball has on women and girls is massive and that is why we like to see a big female crowd here,” she says. “It is a great environment for mums and daughters and teams of girls.”

In the concourse, groups of young girls throw netballs around. Others queue for face paint. There are also members of club teams grouped together, drinking beer. Nneka Smith is one of 14 players from the Cambridgeshire-based Cottenham Jaguars who came decked out in their purple shirts, with matching facemasks and capes. She says: “Some of us were talking earlier about our nieces, cousins, friends and work colleagues who have never seen women take part in sport. They want to bring them to an event like this so they can see that actually women do play sport and it is OK to get sweaty and it is OK not to be wearing make-up and to be in your trackie.”

Or even a superhero costume, for that matter.