An unwelcome cover-up
Meanwhile, the best of the wash-up from the All Blacks latest loss
Well, that backfired.
I was hoping to delay this long enough to have a look at the first hour of play of the first of New Zealand’s six tests on the subcontinent in the space of a couple of months.
Even acknowledging that for many, playing Afghanistan requires a holding of the nose to block out the stench of hypocrisy, I can’t help but be intrigued to see what XI the Black Caps take to the field in Greater Noida with.
Although it was fine on the first morning, it hasn’t been for long enough periods over the past month (23 straight days of rain apparently) and the outfield is sodden in patches near the wicket block.
One report I read yesterday cast doubt on a single ball being bowled, with intermittent thunderstorms forecast over the next five days.
Even if the test is a damp squib that prevents a result, New Zealand could really use a decent red-ball hit out before the Sri Lanka series, which counts for World Test Championship points, with the likes of Devon Conway, Tom Latham and Tom Blundell in particular in need of a confidence boost, while there’s a few spinners who’ve gone a bit dusty on the shelves who could use a long spell or two.
There is a perverse pleasure to be had in sitting back and letting the aftermath of an All Blacks defeat wash over you. It’s a little like mental physiotherapy: it can be a painful exercise, but it helps the odd cogent thought click into place.
In the moments immediately following the 12-18 defeat in Cape Town there was only confusion. This doesn’t look like a poor All Black team, but for long periods they play like one. It doesn’t look like an especially talented one either, but for short periods they play such persuasive rugby that you sense there’s something special in there somewhere.
Most of all, I get the sense that they’re lacking confidence. When they can’t blow the opposition off the field there’s a collective sideways glance and an “Oh crap, here we go again.”
That’s not especially scientific or rooted in advanced metrics, but the only stat that you need to know at this point in Scott Robertson’s reign is that they can’t score points in the final quarter ($). If that fact represented stagnation, a holding pattern, it wouldn’t be so bad, but what we’re seeing in the final 20 is an alarming regression. There is wholesale indiscipline, inaccuracy and a kicking game that turns into a pumpkin as the clock hits the hour mark.
Every call they make turns out to be the wrong one and that must affect confidence from your on-field decision-makers right through the coaching box.
Richard Knowler eases his way gently into this topic on Stuff, although I’m not certain the topic proposed in the headline – Why the All Blacks’ mental toughness is under scrutiny after defeat to Springboks — is actually answered.
The Springboks’ scrambling defence was, at times, almost from another planet. If the All Blacks could have exerted more pressure with precise ball control, the fumble by Barrett in the red zone late in the game was a prime example, the All Blacks could have returned to New Zealand with a respectable 1-1 record.
Now there are valid questions about their mental toughness from the midway point of the second half. They’re certainly not getting enough punch from their bench players.
Australian website The Roar had some measured analysis of the All Blacks, and somehow that seemed to give it more punch.
Gone is the aura of inevitability. Gone is the innovation. Besides maul defence, what new tactic or plan have the All Blacks taught the world in the last five years?
A New Zealand test side is still hard to beat, but merely plays good, fundamental rugby devoid of tricks…
The All Black trophy cabinet is for the third time in this century bare but more alarmingly than before, when Australia (in the John Eales era) and then South Africa (in the John Smit era) gained brief ascendancies, there is no clear path back to the top. Australian rugby was and maybe still is (if the Argentinian arse-whipping is no anomaly) a basket case; this is the partner New Zealand is locked with in an uneven relationship with far too many similarities to spur each other to innovation.
Oof!
I suspect everything in All Blackland will be second-guessed, from opting for three points after sustained periods of pressure, to positional changes and the composition of a bench that for the second week in a row was utterly punchless.
The big question is whether the scratchy start to life under Robertson, or indeed the fourth loss in succession to the Boks, points to a wider malaise.
Gregor Paul thinks so and was firing shots ($).
Where once the All Blacks were the world’s great innovators, technical leaders, and strategic thinkers, that title is now bestowed upon Rassie Erasmus’ Springboks. They continue to be underestimated and derided by a New Zealand public and media who can’t see or respect Erasmus’ rugby genius because of petty-minded spite that they don’t subscribe to some unspecified Kiwi-way of doing things.
This is a bit of a red herring. We all tend to hear the things we want to hear and ignore the things we don’t, but contrary to the above I sense widespread acknowledgement that Erasmus has got the game figured out in a way that makes the Springboks compelling and, at this point, superior opposition. Besides, if we were to focus on fans-of-one-team-not-liking-the-other-team then we’d be writing the same story for time immemorial.
The more germane point was this thundering broadside at the game’s administrators:
What the game in Cape Town showed, and indeed what the whole of the Rugby Championship so far has confirmed, is that the All Blacks are paying a heavy price for the executive madness of 2020, in kicking the South Africans out to try to pull off a Super Rugby heist in which New Zealand Rugby would control and own a new competition to dangle in front of private equity suitors…
The architects of the Cape Town defeat and indeed the obvious demise of New Zealand as a world force, are the executives who saw the arrival of Covid as a chance to make money without ever realising the high-performance consequences of restructuring Super Rugby.
The worrying thing for the All Blacks is he’s right. The worrying thing for rugby is what him being right actually means.
It is accepted that New Zealand Rugby acted with the sort of opportunism during Covid that alienated most, if not all, of their allies. It is also evident that the loss of the South African and Argentine teams has hindered the rugby education of players graduating to test level.
But… let’s not forget that Super Rugby as a competition was widely derided as a bloated, expensive and unattractive mess long before South Africa upped sticks for the north. Ratings for games involving South African sides were terrible and the constituent parts of the Sanzaar mess were primarily interested in protecting their own piece of the pie.
It was, in short, a dog’s breakfast of a rugby tournament.
So are we saying now that we should go back to what it was to make the All Blacks better? What does that say about your ability to produce absorbing below-test-level content and attract new fans to the sport (and attract private money into professional rugby franchises) if the main role of the competition is to act as a development tool for the All Blacks. That is a terrible basis upon which to build a league.
Does the Premier League exist to bolster the England football team? Does the NBA work because it develops players for the Dream Team?
Of course not, but it’s what NZR allowed, by design, Super Rugby to become.
(Interestingly, or perhaps not, NZR announced today they will “host an informal off-record media opportunity on Wednesday” with Super Rugby Pacific chief executive Jack Mesley and chair Kevin Malloy.)
Paul is correct in that this is a mess of NZR’s making, but the mess is more broad than the exodus of South African franchises from a flailing competition. It’s instead the sort of mess you’re left with when your entire business model is predicated upon the success of a single brand - and that brand is suddenly struggling.
***
I can’t help but think the problems are still best summed up by Roxburgh Man, highlighted last week.
“We’re just not not good enough right now. Got to stop complaining and get on with it.”
And, hey, at least they only conceded thirty-odd against Argentina, not 67.
Dropping down a tier, the end of the Tasman v Hawkes Bay Ranfurly Shield clash was a reminder that great rugby stories can exist beyond the black jersey.
That last few minutes was wild, with Hawke’s Bay scoring out wide to level things up before Danny Toala knocked over a sideline conversion. For Shield purposes it was kind of irrelevant, with a draw good enough to retain the Log, but for NPC reasons it was a critical nudge.
The Bay then played out the final few minutes cleverly, taking the ball into contact relatively passively, recycling possession slowly and winding the clock down. They went 10 phases when they should have only gone nine though, with ref Angus Mabey pinging them for holding on with time up.
All that meant was that Campbell Parata, who’d barely sniffed the ball since coming on as a late replacement, had to kick a penalty from halfway.
Cue, scenes.
Technically it is the first time Tasman has won the Shield, though one half of the merged entity, Marlborough, famously achieved the feat by beating Canterbury in 1973.
Kansas City and Baltimore might have kicked off the 2024 NFL season last week but the first Sunday is when the real action starts and the biggest story was the debut of… a certain somebody in the broadcasting booth.
So far the reviews of Tom Brady, in the first game of a 10-year, US$375 million deal, have not been kind.
“Tom Brady, in his NFL broadcast debut, was a man learning the job in real time” - The Athletic
“Tom Brady slammed by NFL fans within minutes of beginning Fox analyst contract” - Daily Mail.
“Tom Brady takes awkward first steps in transition from football field to TV booth” - Washington Post
“Why Tom Brady’s Fox Sports debut wasn’t worth $350 million” - Arizona Republic.
The Guardian posted a review that was hyper-critical, headlining it: “Tom Brady the TV analyst is a strangely colourless colour man.”
It contained these two pars back to back that act as a classic one-two punch.
Sunday’s Brady lovefest on Fox was so overwhelming and inescapable it eventually swallowed the very object of its affection, spilling over into a kind of televisual onanism. A new Tostitos ad starring Brady and former teammate Julian Edelman aired during the Cowboys-Browns game; Fox split the screen to show Brady reacting to his own commercial, his face frozen into a rigid grin. All elite athletes are exhibitionists of some sort, but I wasn’t expecting “Tom Brady watches himself perform” to be a key component of Fox’s new Sunday football package.
The buildup was so grandiose that when the main event finally arrived it almost immediately seemed like a letdown. Burkhardt and Brady started brightly enough, a pair of jaws in the media box smiling through racks of gleaming teeth, but then Brady started talking. And that’s when things started to go wrong. Brady, the 199th overall pick in the 2000 NFL draft, once said that he was grateful to the New England Patriots for taking a chance on him because it meant he would not “have to be an insurance salesman”. He may have dodged a career in insurance, but unfortunately for football fans, Brady has very much not escaped having the voice of an insurance salesman. Burkhardt has a classic broadcast delivery that’s all honey; Brady, by contrast, is pure nose, and his weedy honk did nothing to allay the sense through the first minutes of Sunday’s game that, for perhaps the first time ever, the most successful quarterback of all time was feeling nervous. In that prepubescent squeak the words seemed to rush from Brady’s mouth in staccato bursts of verbiage that neither made sense on their own nor cohered into proper sentences: “Just a good example here – Parsons lining up – in different locations”.
For reasons of curiosity, I tuned in for some of this game and as unkind as the reviews were, I cannot say any of them were wrong.
After a couple of weeks of admin, golf and the occasional missive, The Bounce is back on deck in a more regular fashion from today, with a midweek newsletter and perhaps the odd test special back on the menu. There’s still a bit to wrap my head around, including an America’s Cup regatta that seems to be trying its best to manipulate drama, even when there is no racing.
I’ll get a bit more diligent with my reading and watching of the races, but in the meantime, if you have any general thoughts on the racing, the boats, the venue and the overall vibe of the thing, let me know below. I promise not to steal your thoughts and use them as my own.
The winner of Sweet Spot will be announced midweek.
Frankly, it’s f@cking ironic karma if the Test against Afghanistan is ruined by ‘the covers being on’, given what is happening to women in that society.
Here's something that struck me, given the juxtaposition of both our main national men's sports teams playing at the same time - and who they are playing. Remember back when All Blacks vs Springboks matches attracted protest and tours were cancelled/disrupted?
Why is the same not happening when BlackCaps play Afghanistan now?