The Queens have maintained sixth position on world netball rankings released yesterday.
The Malawi national netball team also remains second in Africa behind South Africa who have also maintained fifth position. Australia are number one in world rankings followed by England and New Zealand in that order.
There were fears that the Queens would drop on the rankings after finishing seventh for the first time in 20 years at the Commonwealth Games in Australia where they lost to Uganda’s She-Cranes.
While describing the development as encouraging, Netball Association of Malawi (NAM) general secretary Carol Bapu and Australia-based shooter Mwawi Kumwenda said the Queens should now fight to get back into the top five.
Said Bapu: “It’s good news. It means our win over New Zealand made up for our loss to Uganda which was by a narrow margin anyway. But we need to work extra hard as there are other teams coming through as well.”
On her part, Mwawi said: “It comes as a relief and it shows that rankings go beyond losing one match. I think there was a lot of concentration on our loss to Uganda other than our win over New Zealand.”
According to www.netball.org, the latest list includes matches up to June 30 2018.
“The ranking list relates to senior teams of member countries that are playing regular international test matches. A rating is a measure of the average performance of a team over a series of matches.
“Each team earns a certain number of points from each international match. Their rating is the total number of points earned divided by the number of matches played. The team with the highest rating is ranked first in the world. The next highest rating is ranked second and so on,” it reads partly.
