‘I rushed home and loaded myself with diclofenac . . . went to bed early and hoped for the best’

The second Covid lockdown in 2020 left the former Silver Fern stranded on 99 national league appearances, but that changed last weekend. Andrew Voerman reports.

How Storm Purvis reached her 100-game milestone

Storm Purvis had a headsup the call was going to come. Her former, and future, team-mate Gina Crampton got in touch early last Friday.

The Stars netball team had crucial ANZ Premiership games to play that Saturday and Sunday and their starting goal keep Anna Harrison had been ruled out after testing positive for Covid-19.

Another of their defenders, Kayla Johnson, was also sick, with something else, so coach Kiri Wills was in need of a fill-in, and Purvis, who retired in 2020, was in her sights.

The Sky Sport presenter and Crowd Goes Wild reporter had been part of the pool of replacement players, able to be called on this season by teams left shorthanded by the virus, but hadn’t played, with scheduling conflicts and postponements intervening on the occasions when it looked like she might be needed.

Quietly, Purvis was somewhat relieved. She had been stuck on 99 national league appearances when she retired two years ago at the age of 27, her knees unable to cope with the rigours of playing professionally.

Since then, her sporting pursuits had consisted largely of downhill mountainbiking, so she wasn’t sure how she would cope if she had to pull on a dress and a bib and take her place on court.

Purvis was shopping for curtains when Crampton called. She tried to brush it off as a joke and returned to the task of furnishing the house she had just moved into, but the prospect became a distraction.

‘‘I kept looking at my phone every few hours thinking, oh god, is she going to call me?’’ says Purvis. ‘‘Is she going to call me? And it took her hours – it wasn’t until about one or two in the afternoon.’’

Wills had been Purvis’ coach during her final two seasons as a fulltime player in the premiership, in 2019 and 2020 – a stint that came to an abrupt end thanks to a Covid lockdown with the two-test Silver Fern stuck on 99 appearances for the Stars, Northern Mystics and Southern Steel.

When Wills came asking Purvis to play against the Waikato-Bay of Plenty Magic in Hamilton last Saturday, she initially ‘‘was throwing excuses at her and then eventually was convinced to just do it’’. ‘‘I rushed home after work and loaded myself with diclofenac, which is an antiinflammatory, and just went to bed early and hoped for the best.’’

After driving down State Highway 1, Purvis linked up with Stars for their captain’s run and found out that not only would she be playing her first game in 643 days, she would be starting.

She was only three weeks removed from having Covid-19 herself and had just got back in the gym. When the Stars physio asked how her cardio had been going, her response was matterof-fact: ‘‘I haven’t done cardio in two years – what do you mean?’’

‘‘It was at that moment that I thought I could see in her head that she was like, ‘Oh my god, what are we doing here? This

is a mistake’.’’ Yet Purvis got out on court, lined up alongside the Stars’ impressive young goal defence Elle Temu, and played the whole match.

‘‘It was quite surreal putting the dress on in the hotel room and then doing the team talk and looking around at a whole lot of my old team-mates,’’ says Purvis.

‘‘The Stars have done well to retain a lot of the players that I was playing with back in 2019 and 2020. Had it been for any other team, I imagine it would’ve been much weirder and I would’ve felt even more of a fraud, but it definitely felt like I was at home, which was really cool.’’

‘‘I rushed home after work and loaded myself with diclofenac, which is an anti-inflammatory, and just went to bed early and hoped for the best.’’

Storm Purvis

In the shooting circle, Purvis was up against Ameliaranne Ekenasio, who is arguably New Zealand’s best active player, when firing on all cylinders. But, right now, she’s still working her way back to full fitness after having her second child and has also had to deal with Covid-19.

‘‘We had a wee giggle pre-game about how we were going to go and at halftime we were like, oh, we’re going to get our second wind now, it’s going to happen.

‘‘Once the game got going, it was like riding a bike, really.

‘‘If you watched the game you might have seen my timing and my speed was a bit out for 45 minutes, so I’m glad I managed to do something in the last quarter.’’

The Stars beat the Magic 67-53 to close in on a place in the premiership top three and the finals series, and Purvis made a quick exit, not wanting to miss a friend’s 30th birthday – one of the excuses Wills hadn’t let her use to get out of playing.

A day later, the Stars beat the second-placed Pulse to move level with them on points, but behind on goal percentage. By then, Purvis was back on the other side of the cameras, even though

Harrison was still out and Johnson’s involvement was limited. One game was enough, and she didn’t want Sky to have to scramble to replace her.

Leana de Bruin filled in instead for the Stars, then went again on Monday night, playing for the Magic as they beat the Mystics. Given how she pulled up on Sunday, Purvis couldn’t comprehend how her former teammate could manage that and surmised that the 44-year-old, who retired in 2019, was simply ‘‘built differently’’.

It had never been about reaching three figures for Purvis, and she wasn’t keen to make a big deal of it when she got the callup, but after all was said and done, she was able to reflect on the experience and what it meant.

At the end of the game, she received champagne and flowers. Her colleagues at Sky got to air the career highlights package that had been put in cold storage in 2020. Two years previously, Covid-19 denied her the chance to play her 100th match; this time around, it allowed her to. ‘‘It was a really, really cool experience,’’ says Purvis. ‘‘One I am super, super grateful for.’’