Agony for White Ferns, but reset is overdue
Aupiki didn't quite deliver but it's a start; the transgender debate gets nasty; and, yes, the Warriors did it again.
Following the all-but-official failure of the White Ferns to advance out of the pool stages at their own World Cup1, a day of reckoning is coming for New Zealand Cricket.
They have to decide how committed they are to becoming a force in the women's game because, all bad luck aside, they are wading in a shallow talent pool and are playing a game that is feels stylistically dated.
Post mortems are painful and in this case it needs to be tempered by the knowledge that most of the athletes in the White Ferns are expected to produce high-performance outcomes on low-performance means.
There has been plenty of evidence in this past Word Cup cycle that New Zealand is falling further behind the highly professionalised systems of England and Australia in particular, so it shouldn’t come as a shock to lose to them. In all seriousness, too, if three or four small bits of cricket went slightly differently, they would have beaten the West Indies, South Africa and England - fine margins and all that.
You also have to remember that many of the advantages you get from having a home World Cup have been nullified by Covid - small crowds, isolated from friends and family and, to a degree, even familiarity with conditions.
New Zealand played all their warm-up ODIs against India at Queenstown, not a World Cup venue, and had a couple of warm-up knockabouts at Lincoln, again not a World Cup venue, and unsurprisingly looked less comfortable with the pitch at Bay Oval for their opener than the West Indies did.
Injuries also were not kind, with Lauren Down in particular a big pre-tournament loss, and Sophie Devine and Lea Tahuhu both pulled up lame at crucial times during yesterday’s heart breaking one-wicket loss to England.
Yet there needs to be some serious introspection about the way they want to play the game because so many of the White Ferns’ struggles come back to a lack of depth and a lack of a Plan B with the bat.
It’s like they chose the batting list in order of how good they are and without any specific attention to the roles they might be asked to play as the innings wears on. The one nod to flexibility was using Tahuhu in a floating role but she has an ODI average of 8.9, so you’re asking a hell of a lot for her to be a consistent game changer.
The White Ferns had a massive middle-order problem that they never came close to solving, one of the topics discussed by Paul Ford and I in a misery-laden BYC CWC special.
Amy Satterthwaite and Maddy Green have scored 296 runs between them with one match to play - which is a good return - but have chewed up 442 deliveries to get them.
In modern cricket, you might be able to carry one accumulator, but not two and certainly not at No4 and 5 in the order, positions where you should be pressing, not lifting, the accelerator.
Satterthwaite identified slow scoring as the team’s Achilles heel.
“At times throughout this campaign we let the bowlers bowl to us just a little bit and rather than taking the brave, positive option,” Satterthwaite said. “Putting up scores of 200 [to] 220-odd against world-class opposition unfortunately is not enough and we needed to find a way to get bigger totals on the board.”
The problem was that the experienced duo had little choice but to play this way because there was no trust in the lower middle to lower order. If you look at where New Zealand were poised at the 10 over mark, apart from 29-3 against Australia, they were in prime position to launch: 41-1 v West Indies; 57-1 v Bangladesh; 51-1 v India; 30-1 v South Africa; and 52-0 v England.
That it rarely happened points to a poorly constructed line-up.
This will hurt. The White Ferns were built around an experienced core of players - Devine, Suzie Bates, Tahuhu, Satterthwaite, Martin and Frances Mackay - in their 30s. Aside from the Kerr sisters, there are question marks as to whether the younger brigade are ready to step up.
With disappointment comes opportunity, however, and the White Ferns are overdue an ODI reset.
Let’s see what NZC is prepared to throw at it.
Super Rugby Aupiki shows there is a future, but it also shows there is much work to do. The effective final between Chiefs Manawa and the Blues was not a great advertisement for the competition with an astonishing amount of penalties being dished out.
Unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, the Blues had already given away 16 penalties shortly after halftime. Their discipline was so poor the referee started seeing ghost offences, most notably the outrageous sinbinning of Krystal Murray for not rolling away when she clearly did everything in her power to successfully roll away.
The Chiefs scored a couple of fantastic late tries so even if the competition was half baked, the icing was spectacular.
The Warriors are going to shorten some lives this season. Veins would have been popping out of heads and blood pressure boiling at the way they butchered try-scoring opportunity after opportunity (even the word “opportunity” doesn’t feel right - they were gifts).
Even coach Nathan Brown lost his equanimity.
“You can’t drop the ball with the line wide open twice... Whether you deserve to win or not, you get the ball with no one in front of you, you catch it and put it down and score.”
The simplicity of thought expressed there by Brown reminds me of a classic Bill Shankly quote when the legendary former Liverpool manager was discussing the nuance of centre-forward play with one of his strikers: “If you’re not sure what to do with the ball, just pop it in the net and we’ll discuss your options afterwards.”
It is crazy early to be this reactionary, but already it feels like Friday’s match against the struggling West Tigers is season framing.
You may remember me referencing Tom Morris on Friday, the intrepid AFL reporter given an almighty tune up by Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge following that team’s opening round loss.
It turns out he had been sacked that day, not for any of the non-existent sins identified by Beveridge, but because he’s a complete a***hole.
The Lia Thomas controversy is getting uglier - and more cruel. Thomas, who spent the first 20 years of her life as a man, won an NCAA swimming title last week in the 500m freestyle.
The reaction to her success has become more strident. Like this piece by Julie Bindle in Spectator that pulls no punches.
Imagine a girl who has trained all of her life as a swimmer. Through backbreaking hard work and obsessive dedication, she reaches the top of her game and is ranked number one in the world. Then a male competitor transitions to female, competes against her, and takes the first prize. I actually don’t care whether these individual transwomen genuinely believe they are women or if they are being opportunistic. It is still grossly unfair…
We’ve all heard about the arrogance and cockiness of mediocre white men, but this is it in a nutshell. Utterly brilliant women are being beaten and overshadowed by men not good enough to beat other men.
Why would girls who had previously aimed for first place in professional competitive sports bother to reach the peak of their game if some bloke can come along and take it from them? It is more than unfair, it is worse than cheating, it is the annihilation of hope.
I hate Bindel’s suggestion of opportunism. Perhaps I’m naive but I just can’t envisage a situation where anybody would put themselves through that uncertainty and anxiety in their lives just to win a few gongs, but I’m hearing this idea more and more now.
Thomas was shunned by her competitors on the victory dais. In fact, the second, third and fourth place finishers gathered on their own to the side for a ‘victory’ photo (see below) while Thomas stood alone with a weak smile on the actual podium.
Virginia Tech swimmer Reka Gyorgy, who missed out on the semifinals by one spot, wrote a letter to the NCAA condemning them for putting her and Thomas in this position.
She specifically requested of the media that her statement runs in full or not at all so i won’t pull from it but she actually has kind words for tThomas’ strength and dedication but says in no way should she be allowed to compete against biological women.
I’ve said it before - there are no easy free-of-resistance answers to one of the most complex sporting questions of our age, but sports leaders have to lead.
So far we have had nothing but weak science and platitudes.
Holy hell I picked a bad time to re-engage with the Wellington Phoenix!
Seeing Ferrari back top of the F1 world this morning was heartwarming, even if it’s only temporary. It’s ridiculous given that before the budget cap they had at times spent close to half a billion bucks a year on developing fast F1 cars, but Ferrari just feels like more of a team and less of a corporation than the rest of the grid.
As much as I admire the precocious talent of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen there was a karmic quality to him and his teammate Sergio Perez being forced to retire with just a couple of laps remaining while in second and third places, opening up a podium spot for Lewis Hamilton.
Meanwhile, in Texas, Scott McLaughlin was pipped at the post by his teammate Josef Newgarden, but he’s going to be a genuine IndyCar title threat this year.
THIS WEEK
Unless something big pops up, there’ll be a Wednesday newsletter for paying subscribers, and the usual Friday TWTW and TWTWB missive.
At the time of writing, there was a mathematical chance of making the semifinals, but the permutations for that to happen seem beyond improbable.
Hey Dylan, thanks for The Bounce, it's always a great read. It was great to hear you on the Mad Monday podcast too. Regarding the Warriors, I'd like to know if you've got any kind of insight from your newspaper days, and any behind-the-scenes access that this role might have afforded you? Firstly, I'm a keen Warriors fan, and watch religiously, and until the end of the 80th minute, every single week, despite recognising the infinite mental and emotional harm such a habit can inflict. Watching has become easier in recent years though, but this is because I don't watch with any great hope anymore. I've lowered my expectations in an attempt to lower my blood pressure. My huge concern is that on paper, our team is often far better than it's performances. I'd like to know from someone in your position: do you think losing is baked into the DNA of the organisation as a whole, and what do you think they need to do to turn the corner? We always seem to be less than the sum of our parts and I'm concerned that for years now, the administration and coaching staff haven't known how to improve things. Unfortunately I don't see this changing in the next little while, so I will continue to hate-watch with my expectations in the basement.
Disagree that the science is weak regarding transgender athletes. The science is overwhelming, but it is being ignored by weak administration bending over backwards to be "inclusive" at the expense of fairness.