One of the rarest and most coveted achievements in domestic sports leagues is the invincible season, where a team managed the nearly impossible feat of not losing a single match throughout that entire time.
Ever since 1889, when the association football team Preston North End avoided losing a single time, the invincible season has become a fascination throughout sports, and whilst there are a lot of amazing individual and team accolades, perfection is one many players and coaches dream of.
However, until 2022, no English team had played a full season of netball events without losing a single time, with the 20-week season and two-round playoffs naturally lending itself to the potential for an underdog to gain an upset victory.
That all changed on 5th June 2022, when the Manchester Thunder capped off the perfect Vitality Netball Superleague season by winning their fourth Grand Final against the Loughborough Lightning, ending their season with a 22-0 season.
This had never happened before in English netball history and is a credit to the incredible consistency of one of the most consistent and clinical teams in the history of the Superleague.
Internationally, there have only been two other similarly perfect seasons, both by Australian teams but neither did so over as long a season.
The Sydney Swifts won the 2006 Commonwealth Bank Trophy in utterly dominant fashion, winning their 14 regular season games and both matches of the final to earn a perfect record of 16-0, and during the entire history of the league only won less than ten games twice.
They nearly repeated the feat four years later in the Australian and New Zealand combined ANZ Championship, winning all 13 regular season games only to lose the major semi-final and preliminary final, missing out on the Grand Final game entirely.
What perhaps stung worse was that just a year later, the Queensland Firebirds won the 2011 finals and went 15-0 throughout the season.