The 2015 Netball World Cup, like the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics, is a tournament held every four years. This will be the fourteenth time the event has been staged and sixteen teams will compete for the title of World Champions, last won by Australia at the 2011 tournament in Singapore. This time around the location is Sydney, and as a result it’s the Royal Australian Mint doing the commemorative coin honours. Like the ICC Cricket World Cup coin issued back in November last year, the RAM has gone that extra mile and struck another cool domed coin. Far more difficult to strike than they at first appear, the concept of striking domed commemoratives originated back in 2009 when the Monnaie de Paris issued gold and silver designs for the International Year of Astronomy. The RAM carried on with this concept by issuing a three-coin series called Southern Sky featuring constellations in the southern hemisphere. Beautiful designs, the first in particular has appreciated heavily.

This isn’t the first domed sports coin to appear over the last couple of years. The most high profile one was undoubtedly the United States Mint’s Baseball Hall of Fame coin, but the Monnaie de Paris revisited the concept with its FIFA World Cup 2014 entrant, and as we said earlier, the RAM with its ICC Cricket World Cup coin and the NZ Post with a similar one. The Monnaie de Paris have another coin due to debut very shortly which we’ll hopefully cover this week. At one-ounce of fine silver in weight, this one is identical to the cricket coin in format and has a clever and attractive design on the reverse face. The obverse disappoints with just the Queens mugshot present; the effigy being superbly integrated into a stadium design on the earlier cricket coin.

Available to order now, shipping starts on 13 July with the coin selling at $113.64 AUD ($125 inside Austrlia). Nicely packaged, it looks a fine gift for the fan of this underrated sport.

MINTS DESCRIPTION

In August 2015, Australia will host the world’s pinnacle netball championship, the 14th Netball World Cup and for the second time, the Netball World Cup will be hosted in Sydney. Held every four years since the world cup’s inception in 1963, Australia previously hosted the Netball World Cup on two occasions, in Perth in 1967 and in Sydney in 1991.

Having been victorious on both occasions, Australia will face the 2015 championships with an advantage to secure their 11th Netball World. The ten day event will showcase the worlds netball elite from 16 countries. As the most popular women’s sport in Australia and with an estimated one million players nationwide, Australia’s association with netball is enduring.

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