The Inter Company Netball Championship, organized by SriLankaSports.com was held at the St. Joseph’s College Indoor facility in Colombo on the 17th of October.
The tournament which was inaugurated in 2006, and has been held over 4 consecutive years since then and this year as well with the objective of unearthing Sri Lanka’s top netballing companies.
The tournament itself is unique in the fact that it has a Powerplay feature – first introduced to the local scene by SriLankaSports. The powerplay is a period of time in which each score by a team counts for double the points. As in cricket, the captain is allowed to take the power play in whatever quarter she wishes to.
The highlight of the tournament was definitely the Cup final which was contested between two Netballing Powerhouses Seylan Bank and Hatton National Bank. Both teams featured past and present members of the Sri Lanka National squad, making it a tough one to call. The very same teams met at last week’s Mercantile Netball Championship Final in which Seylan emerged victorious by just one goal and HNB were clearly thirsting for revenge.
Both teams seemed to want to employ the same tactic of lobbing the ball to the tall shooters on the second pass. In this aspect, Seylan bank seemed to come out on top with the Wing Attack and Centre finding former national player, the 7ft Tharjini Sivalingam more often than not. The game itself featured some interesting match ups with Tharjini Sivalingam of Seylan coming up against her former teammate Shashika Samarasinghe who represented HNB. Like the game, this battle see-sawed throughout the game with Shashika intercepting many passes, yet once the ball was in Tharjini’s hands, she was virtually unstoppable.
The game was truly a up and down battle, with HNB holding a slender one goal lead after the 1st quarter, while Seylan led at the end of both the 2nd and the 3rd quarters. Both teams opted to take their power plays in the 4th quarter. From the first whistle to the last, the teams were never separated by more than 2 goals, except when HNB took a 5 goal lead deep into 4thquarter, however, Seylan staged a remarkable comeback to register a 28/27 victory over last year’s champions.
The results of the Bowl, Plate and Mixed championships are as follows.
Bowl:
Champions – Kanrich Finance
Runner’s Up – Sri Lanka Telecom
Plate:
Champions – Expo Lanka
Runner’s Up – David Pieris Motors
Mixed:
Champions – Seylan Bank
Runner’s Up – Nations Trust Bank
Cup:
Champions – Seylan Bank
Runner’s Up – Hatton National Bank
