A long Week That Was...
...and a football Weekend that Will Be
Just a very quick note to say welcome to a big bunch of new subscribers that have jumped aboard in the past 10 days or so.
Great to have you along.
It’s shaping up as a fairly quiet couple of weeks, so much so that Stuff’s Ian Anderson thinks Ross Taylor might be the biggest local drawcard in sport over the next couple of months.
With the fallow period in mind, next week I will take the time to walk you through some of the plans for this newsletter in 2023, which will include more twice-a-week free stuff, plus some extra-extra content for $ subscribers as we head towards some high-profile world cups.
Thanks again, and if you’re still scrabbling around for not-your-usual-Xmas-present presents, take advantage of the deal of the year!
THE WEEK THAT WAS
England’s first test victory over Pakistan was one of the most incredible games of cricket I’ve seen, so much so that I found myself lying in bed watching on my phone as Monday bled into Tuesday, willing England to victory as if I had been raised in Plymouth, not New Plymouth.
It’s not natural to feel this way about England. It’s like cheering for the Prison Guards in The Longest Yard.
And yet here we are…
The reason is pretty simple. They’re walking the talk. It’s one thing to say you’re going to be prepared to lose in order to win, it’s another thing to live it. It’s really difficult to imagine a scenario where you’re presented with the flattest, most lifeless wicket conceivable and say, “It doesn’t matter that how many batting records we set in this match, we’re prepared to throw it all away on the off chance we might be able to trick Pakistan into losing their heads.”
What Ben Stokes’ team is doing plays into the English media’s boom or bust story factory, too. I was intrigued to read Mark Ramprakash’s post-test column. He was, rightfully, full of praise.
What a great place this dressing room must be. Never in my career, at any level, have I seen players being told to go out, give it a crack and not to worry about the consequences. This freedom suits the young, modern-day player, with their innovative mindsets, their power, their range of shot.
What a contrast to his sniffy reaction when Brendon McCullum was appointed coach and Stokes captain.
McCullum has simply not done a lot of coaching, which is extraordinary because he has been given an absolutely massive position in world cricket. At a time in the English game when it feels so much is on the line, the test team has been put into the hands of people with huge potential but no experience.
Ramprakash was not wrong in pointing out the shortcomings of McCullum, but he played into a very English trope, which is to see something as either picture perfect or deeply flawed.
At the moment the picture is perfect, but you suspect that it won’t take too many losses before the I-told-you-sos emerge.
We discuss that and more, including the exodus of New Zealand’s stars over the holiday period, in this week’s BYC (recorded Wednesday).
We also talk about the Australian-West Indies series. The second test began in Adelaide last evening and continued a theme: Australia batting the West Indies into submission.
Australia have now scored 1110-9 across the two tests. I tried to put recency bias aside and come with a worse day-one test bowling performance than what I witnessed yesterday and it was a struggle. No spinners of any note, a back-up seamer injured after two overs, Alzarri Joseph and Jason Holder bowling at about 70 percent capacity and a 33-year-old back-up wicketkeeper bowling nine overs and looking about the best of the lot.
Malcolm Marshall must be rolling in his grave.
Meanwhile, if you thought Ross Taylor had a grievance to air about getting dropped from the Black Caps’ captaincy, David Warner could burn it all down when he finally writes his book.
Grab the popcorn.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, so there is a small chance I’m putting you on the trail to long-interview boredom, but I seriously doubt it. I know I have it cued up and ready to roll for my next long run (anything approaching 10km falls into the long run category at the moment). Between Two Beers talks to Ruth Croft, an athlete that rarely fails to amaze.
To pivot back to high-profile England coaches, there once was a time when a draw against the All Blacks warranted a victory lap1, now it leads to the ouster of Eddie Jones.
Clive Woodward wasn’t surprised, saying Eddie Jones’ empty rhetoric and obsession with looking too far ahead led to a period of English rugby that won’t be looked upon kindly by history.
He became completely focused on the 2023 World Cup and that was a costly error. International rugby is very simple: focus everything on the next game with absolutely zero distractions. The fans who pump the money into the sport didn’t buy his hype.
The Sydney Morning Herald says Rugby Australia is being encouraged to bring in Jones, possibly as a consultant, though RA has been down this path before.
It is a scenario with plenty of appeal on paper but observers would point to the disastrous installation of Scott Johnson over the top of Michael Cheika in 2019 as an example of it having the opposite effect. Cheika resented Johnson’s presence and later said he should have resigned when presented with the arrangement.
Rennie is a much more collaborative operator and the arrangement would be temporary, but sources close to the coach on Wednesday indicated the New Zealander would not countenance having Jones foisted upon him.
It’s crazy talk, surely? The Greens and Act have a better chance of establishing a cordial working relationship than Jones and Rennie.
Interesting to read that women’s volleyball was booming in the States, with record viewership, steep rises in participation and the formation of a professional league with three more to follow.
It is reportedly taking a lot of young athletes that basketball once had a stranglehold on.
Two years ago, for the first time, more high school girls played volleyball (432,176) than basketball (429,504), according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. In 2015-16, volleyball added another 4133 girls to those numbers, while basketball lost 276 participants.
Examine the past decade, and the numbers are more striking. Statistics… show an increase of more than 40,000 volleyball players in that span and a decrease of 23,000 basketball players.
"There's been a huge African-American crossover into our sport, and it’s become the social norm now to play volleyball, whereas 10 or 15 years ago, it was basketball," Texas coach Jerritt Elliott said.
The reason I find this interesting is because my daughter has recently taken up the sport and it appears to be going through an underground boom in New Zealand too. I went along to the recent Auckland junior secondary school champs and was amazed by a) how vibrant the tournament was b) how many good teams there were from schools right across the socio-economic spectrum and, c) how great it is to watch.
Given we tend to take our sporting trends from the US now, not the UK, volleyball could be the future for girls sport, and if so, I’m buying it.
The USA gets Brittney Griner back, a brilliant basketballer arrested and jailed after small traces of cannabis oil were found in her vape cartridges at a Moscow airport just days before Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia gets Viktor Bout back, an arms dealer known in the west as the Merchant of Death.
Seems fair.
It’s raining money at the annual Major League Baseball winter meetings.
The headline act was Aaron Judge who hit free agency and re-signed with the New York Yankees for an eye-popping $360 million, nine-year contract. On the surface it’s a hideous deal - Judge will start next season as a 31-year-old outfielding slugger who doesn’t use PEDS, so his effective shelf life is questionable - yet it’s one most pundits suggested the Yankees had to make because, well, they’re the Yankees.
It wasn’t the only garish piece of business at the meetings, given that $1.6 billion was spent on players. As much as the Yankees loved the Judge signing, they would have also enjoyed seeing the face of the Boston Red Sox, their bitter rivals, sign for the San Diego Padres. Shortstop Xander Bogaerts signed a ludicrous 10-year, $280m deal, a figure the Red Sox didn’t reportedly come within $60m of matching. The Sawx did, however, spend more than $100m on a player, Masataka Yoshida, out of the Japanese leagues, so they’re not paupers.
The rich-poor line in baseball is neatly captured in a single tweet.
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
Despite all the drama of the group stage, if you swap Morocco for Germany and, perhaps, either Portugal or Croatia for Spain, you’ve pretty much got the quarter-finalists most expected. That’s not a bad thing, not at all. You want your best teams at the pointy end of the competition and it’s hard to make an argument that any of the teams in the quarter-finals have been lucky to get there. In a slight departure from normal programming, I’ll list the quarter-finals in order of how much I’m looking forward to them.
1. France v England, Al Khor, Sunday 8am, Sky Sport
Imagine being asked to put your name on this story.
2. Netherlands v Argentina, Lusail, Saturday 8am, Sky Sport 2
Could there be a mouth kiss on the way between these two adversaries?
3. Morocco v Portugal, Al Thumama, Sunday 4am, Sky Sport 7
Of course it’s a peripheral player stealing all the headlines… and funny lines.
4. Croatia v Brazil, Al Rayyan, Saturday 4am, Sky Sport 7
Will the Samba Boys dance again? Roy Keane hopes not.
See the lead item.
Pakistan v England, 2nd test, Multan, today-Tues 6pm, Sky Sport 2
Sticking with cricket, it’s a horrendous mismatch, but I’ll tune in for at least some of the 1st ODI.
NZ v Bangladesh, 1st ODI, Wellington, 11am, Spark Sport
This is a lazy half lie that has taken hold. This was a year, 1997, when the All Blacks played England twice. The first test was taken to Old Trafford, where England were defeated easily in a dreadful game of rugby. In between the first and second NZ-England tests, the All Blacks thrashed Wales at Wembley and England got smashed by South Africa. When they met again at Twickenham, English rugby was at a desperately low ebb and they raced to a big lead in front of 75,000 people and somehow held on for a 26-26 draw in the final test of the year. England was not celebrating the draw so much as they were thanking the public, the sell-out Twickenham crowd, for sticking by them, but we, as is our right, have chosen to use it as just one more reason to hate English rugby.
Regarding that victory lap, I believe it was after the first-test loss, which is why it seemed so egregious
Weirdly Volleyball has always been a vibrant 'other sport'. Even back in 'my day' (cough 3 odd decades ago) there were a ton of tournaments (eg. every Taranaki school had at least a jnr and snr boys and girls team), really well organised North or sth island tournaments for juniors and Nationals for seniors. just as you said, massive range of schools and demographics - arguably it's continued this way because guess who DOESN'T tend to offer volleyball - the private schools. So, no over coaching, money flowing in to make it dominated by one or two schools. Tauranga always tended to dominate then, maybe again as all it's population at schools offering it, vs say Auckland where a large part dont' play due to all the private schools (no idea how it stacks today, just an 'i reckon').
Def even more tournaments now, new rules have helped the game grow, always seems to have good regional admins who presumably do it more for love than $ since I'm sure it's well down the grant spectrum.