Always look on the bright side
Some are taking the collapse of an empire better than others; Scott Dixon remains ageless; and a couple of fringe Black Caps make their marks.
In the spirit of positivity, The Bounce will tell you why the Crusaders ongoing struggles are actually a good thing for New Zealand rugby.
From 2009-16, the Crusaders didn’t win a title. Then they won seven. Now they’re at the bottom of the table. The guy that coached them between 2017-2023, the good part, is now coaching the All Blacks. That’s a good thing, surely?
Badges don’t win titles, talent and coaching does. There were times when it felt like all the Crusaders had to do was turn up to win. Not so much anymore. That’s good for the integrity of the competition, surely?
Levi Aumua. Nothing against players either making the most of their market value, going to a team where they feel they will have the most chance of success, or those just looking for a change of scenery, but at the same time it was hard not to groan upon hearing the Crusaders had picked up the late-blooming midfielder from Moana Pasifika. It reads like an archetypal rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer story, but it hasn’t worked out that way. If the Crusaders have to work that little bit harder in the future to get the cream of the available talent, that’s not a bad thing, surely?
More entertaining coverage, particularly from Stuff, who seem to be taking this crumbling empire thing personally.
In a season stacked with lame performances, this one takes the cake as the worst of all.
Poor discipline, bad defensive reads, a faltering lineout, loose carries, questionable decision-making, an overly lateral attack, an ongoing inability to exit their half efficiently - the list goes on.
And, perhaps most telling of all when it comes to gauging where the Crusaders’ heads are at, they coughed up two rolling maul tries to the Force.
During what could be charitably be labelled as their worst performance in recent memory, the Crusaders hit bedrock during the undignified 37-15 spanking by a Force team loaded with cast-offs from other clubs and franchises…
The Crusaders' administrators and board must put on their snorkels and take a deep-dive into the issue of how the Super Rugby Pacific title holders have found themselves in the position where they have a 1-7 record, and are flapping around among the mudfish in the competition’s dark cellar.
As a rule, mudfish are found in rivers, not cellars, but that ecological quibble aside, you get the picture.
When you have your own writers sharpening knives, I’m not sure what the need is to call upon Jeff Wilson’s analysis, which can be found on Sky without difficulty anyway (this cross-pollination of media is copied from Australia and although it makes sense on a number of levels, I’ve become increasingly leery of it1), especially when his take is:
Wilson [said] the one thing the Crusaders needed to do for Penney to keep his job next season - make the playoffs.
Great. Thanks for that.
The mere fact the Crusaders can and probably will make the playoffs from 1-7 is, IMHO, a far bigger issue for rugby than whether a labouring coach will be reprieved by a laughably soft playoff format.
The Hurricanes and Blues look good, though, and the Chiefs are okay. The Highlanders, wow, they might be worse than the Crusaders.
From RNZ:
The Highlanders have just been awful under Clarke Dermody, with no real sign of improvement other than the likes of Billy Harmon and Jacob Ratumaitavuki-Kneepkens valiantly trying to do everything themselves.
To put it in perspective: the Highlanders have Rhys Patchell and Martín Bogado on their books… who played for Wales and Argentina respectively last year. Both found themselves… playing club rugby yesterday in Dunedin because they’d been left out of the Highlanders squad that travelled to Australia. That’s presumably a fair bit of investment to bring in two overseas test players, only to end up having them line up against a bunch of uni students and freezing works employees halfway through the season.
It’s a well-worn joke by now, but after New Zealand Rugby tried to blade most of Australia’s teams from Super Rugby, it really is time for our ‘friends’ across the Tassie to ask if we can realistically sustain five fully professional rugby clubs.
I guess this really wasn’t a good-news item…
In the newfound spirit of negativity, The Bounce also has to acknowledge there was nothing good about the Warriors on Friday night. After laying down a marker over the first quarter of an hour, it all went horribly downhill in the ’Gong.
Coach Andrew Webster called for a shift in attitude after shipping five unanswered tries against St George during the 12-30 loss.
“We want to be the team that when things don’t go our way we find a way to get back in the fight, slow it down, get the momentum back. We work so hard and talk a lot about it. You can’t have a poor attitude around errors when things don’t go your way and we’ll work on that.
“There’s not a lot technically [to work on] this week, we’ve got to work on our attitude defensively and wanting to do it together.”
This is valid. It’s the sort of thing you want to hear from the coach after a poor performance but… it wasn’t just the defence misfiring. The timing in attack was not great either and might it be that Webster was outcoached by Shane Flanagan? I don’t think there was one disguised ‘face’ ball that created any confusion in the Dragons’ ranks, and the Warriors threw a lot of them.
We’re a long way from panic stations but a spectacular rebound on Anzac Day wouldn’t go astray, especially as I will be there for it.
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Sir Colin Giltrap would have enjoyed the weekend. Not only did Supercars return to New Zealand in front of a sold-out Taupo International Motorsport Park crowd but a Kiwi won the first race.
As the weekend turned to Monday in New Zealand, one of the primary beneficiaries of Giltrap’s largesse, Scott Dixon, pulled off another win for the ages in IndyCars, this time nursing a thirsty, fuel-deprived car home at the Long Beach GP in front of a group of young challengers who had plenty left in the tank.
Scott Dixon proved yet again Sunday that almost nothing is impossible for him behind the wheel of a race car, winning the Long Beach Grand Prix with a dramatic blend of patience and aggression over the closing laps.
Nobody… saves fuel better than Dixon, and he drove the last 34 laps of the 85-lap street race on one tank of… fuel in the No 9… to hold off a hard-charging Colton Herta – who was on a more conventional, less risky fuel strategy – by .9798s.
“That was tough; that was really tough,” Dixon said. “Honestly, I didn’t think we were going to make it.”
On the Central Plateau, Kiwi Andre Heimgartner’s Saturday win was a tonic, but at the risk of getting the middle finger from owner Tony Quinn, it might have papered over some concerns as to the long-term viability of the Taupo track. Described 6376 times during the coverage as a “technical” track, that would seem to be another way of saying very, very slow.
Rain made the racing fascinating on Saturday; in the dry on Sunday everything came across as a little pedestrian.
There’s a technique sporting organisations use when they’ve run into a few media-inspired headwinds. You look for a friendly face, or masthead, and run a call-and-response type piece.
This might be the best, most classically executed example of it seen for a long time.
In recent weeks Netball New Zealand has been burdened by news that they are facing a huge decrease in broadcasting revenue, which has come alongside criticism of the competitiveness of the ANZ Premiership.
The gist of the linked story is that NNZ has done incredibly to weather the Covid storm, and they have the figures to prove it. There are a whole bunch of numbers in there that add up, when you include government grants, to a surplus of just under $1 million.
That’s great, but doesn’t alter the fact that future surpluses will be placed under severe duress if and when a reduced broadcast deal kicks in. There are smart people at NNZ, and they’ll figure the dollars out, but the below was simply dissembling (emphasis is mine).
NNZ had always prided itself on their prudent financial approach, which remained critical in a challenging economic environment, [CEO Jen] Wyllie said.
“I think we have to, we don’t have the back stops. We don’t have the big equity deals. We’ve never had the equality for women’s sport in the media.”
No, sorry. Not buying that.
Media coverage of women’s sports is a genuine issue, but netball has always been the outlier in this regard. Until recently at least.
It is the one female-dominated sport regularly shown on TV and received a healthy amount of media coverage and exposure. But this has fallen off a cliff with dwindling interest in the domestic league. They can’t blame inequality for that any more than cricket or rugby bosses can blame the greenhouse gases for plummeting coverage of the Shell Trophy or NPC.
As far as NNZ is concerned, the linked piece in Stuff is like getting a paid advertorial that you don’t have to pay for.
Bowing to popular pressure, I scoured the web for an interesting ‘take’ from the Phoenix’s draw with Newcastle, a draw that could damage their hopes of the nice-to-have-but-not-vital Premiers Plate.
I found a poll. “Was Alex Rufer the right man to take Wellington Phoenix’s penalty?”
Well, given what we know now, clearly not.
In the absence of institutional knowledge, I voted “Other”, along with at least one more person. It seems that just under half thought it should have been Kosta Barbarouses.
A couple of subscribers have reached out to say they’re attending the final regular season match of the season this weekend against Macarthur FC. Any nuggets from the ground greatly appreciated.
I have not seen a ball bowled in the current T20I series against Pakistan, but I’ve seen enough scorecards to ponder whether Mark Chapman has become the master of the small occasion. He’s been masterful in low-key T20s in Pakistan, scoring 34, 65*, 16*, 71*, 104*, 0*, 19 and this morning’s 87*.
Yes, he averages 198 at a strike rate of 170 in T20Is in Pakistan. Even acknowledging the small sample size, that’s a bonkers run of success in unfamiliar conditions.
It’s fair to say that Chapman hasn’t fully convinced for New Zealand yet, particularly during and after a difficult ODI World Cup.
Another batter desperately seeking a signature moment for his country is Will Young, but he might have already provided one for Nottinghamshire, his third county side in the past few seasons.
Young is unbeaten on 156 in a match against Somerset, and is part of a record-breaking unbroken third-wicket partnership of 370 with Joe Clarke.
He has never scored an first-class double ton and you can patch into a livestream on YouTube from 10pm tonight to see if he can break that duck.
Here is a very modern American tale, where the powderkegs of race (particularly viewed through the lens of a red southern state), an overheated high school sports environment, and pushy parents collide. The result is ugly.
In the parking lot, adults traded insults. John Dailey, a hulking man identified in one video, approached Tate Reilly’s mother, Melanie, and told her, “I’m going to pray for the evil in your heart to go away.” Police arrived. As various onlookers began taking cellphone video, the sound of metal baseball cleats crunching against the pavement best told the story: Led by their adult coaches and supported by their parents, members of the Fort Myers high school baseball team quit a game and left their two teammates, Reilly and Tucker, who happened to be the only two players of colour on the team, alone on the field.
For reasons I will expand upon, potentially as early as midweek, along with a couple of things from this weekend not touched on here.
Thanks, Dylan! Some thoughts:
- The call for 'better attitude' has always irked me regarding professional sports.
- Not sold on Mark Chapman yet- his fielding bloopers over the home summer were many and awful.
- Re your earlier comments last week on the success of AFL and NRL, I wonder if their not having to (really) service an international game is a factor. AFL doesn't care about growing their game internationally (I know they have had games of Gaelic football vs Ireland but it seemed more of a festival thing?) International league is a bit of a joke. The last world cup was abysmal, the eligibility rules are a laugh, and I reckon most players would take a premiership or origin series (Michael Maguire...) over a test series win any day. As a result, there's no 'rest and rotation' with the annual, brutal international calendar, no real stress about a 'world cup window' and no sense that players are merely being 'blooded' for higher honours. There's a sense of 'this is our comp and this is where you will see the best of our sport every week'. I'm certainly not advocating bombing international rugby, but the population that just tune in for All Blacks games is growing.
Apologies for the length of the above, and kudos for the Shell Trophy reference- have a good week.
Outside of the unlucky “earthquake” season I think the Crusades dynasty went on a bit of a hiatus until Scott took over so it's not the first time that the coach has proven to be the key to success or failure. I agree with you though, winning 1 from 7 shouldn’t have you in any sort of conversation around finals. Im still struggling to get interested in the 15 man code until the semis and International season roles around.