Another bruising boardroom year in store

The Week That Was and the Weekend/Monday That Will Be

A more laborious than usual Friday newsletter due to sudden and frustrating loss of the ‘g’, ‘h’ and “ ” keys.

Dame Patsy knows… Getty Images

Rugby season hasn’t even started in earnest and it feels like 2024 is going to be trawling over much the same boardroom ground as 2023, and 2022…

From Stuff: “NZ Rugby, provinces and players on collision course over reforms.”

The chairs of the provincial unions are set to meet in Wellington [today] to discuss crucial New Zealand Rugby reform proposals, but the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association remains resolutely opposed to any changes to the recommendations of the NZ Rugby governance review published last August.

These were the crunchiest lines:

NZRPA chief executive Rob Nichol [said] on Thursday that anything less than adopting the review in full would be a slap in the face for the rugby public.

“We all agreed [with] the expert panel, we have all accepted the findings of the panel and what the report covers in terms of the New Zealand Rugby constitutional structure and board being not fit for purpose,” Nichol said… “[NZR and the unions] seem to be going through some form of process where they’ve decided that they’re in a better position to decide what should happen, moving forward as opposed to the expert panel that we all agreed.”

From the NZ Herald x2 ($): “New Zealand Rugby’s Board should resign en masse now”; “New Zealand Rugby faces financial crunch: Silver Lake cash investment running out.”

Both these stories - Gregor Paul’s original and Trevor McKewen’s follow-up column - point to the Silver Lake deal being a spectacularly bad bit of business.

Here’s the top line from the original:

New Zealand Rugby’s (NZR) financial health has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, with the national body having made high-level presentations to stakeholders late last year which showed it is losing so much money that it will have burned through its $200 million of Silver Lake cash by 2031.

These disastrous forecasts are being made because the transformational lift in revenue NZR projected to deliver once Silver Lake came on board as an equity partner in 2022 has not materialised… [A] combination of lower-than-forecast revenues and higher-than-predicted costs - which includes a $10.5m per annum interest payment to Silver Lake - have led NZR to project a new financial scenario in which the reserves built from selling a 5.7 percent equity stake in its commercial assets will be seriously depleted before there is a material lift in income.

A figure quoted to The Bounce by a source suggested those lower-than-forecast revenue numbers could be close to $50m per year, which represents a sizable hole in the budget for a business of NZR and subsidiary NZRC’s size.

McKewen, whose seven-part Pieces of Silver podcast last year highlighted some of the fundamentally flawed thinking behind NZR’s private equity play, responded to Paul’s story while also signposting Paul Cully’s story above: 

In reality, it is merely the chickens coming home to roost over a dumb deal which featured massive over-promising, a falsely rosy set of financials and a bunch of bonehead provincial union administrators feathering their own nests…

In revealing the latest twist in the tortured Silver Lake story, Paul presented us with compelling evidence once again that the country’s 26 provincial unions continue to be the tail that wags the NZR dog. As a weak board sits by, the game in this country continues to be steered towards a financial nightmare.

Oof!

Has rugby here ever been more in need of a charismatic new national coach to return the focus to the field?

THE WEEK THAT WAS

If you want to get rich quick, don’t buy the latest can’t miss blockchain grift, grow 30 centimetres instead and play basketball.

Forty of the top 100 earners in 2023 were NBA basketballers, led by the ageless LeBron James who pulled in a cool US$125.7 million (fourth overall).

Five of the world’s top 12 earners were footballers, including Cristiano Ronaldo ($275m) at number one, yet none of them play in the traditional Big Four leagues of England, Spain, Italy or Germany. 

Another point of interest, with the retirement of Serena Williams there were no women on the list.

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I’m about as interested in this Enhanced Olympics event as I would be in seeing how many cigarettes a human can smoke in a 24-hour period, or how many hot dogs anybody can eat in 10 minutes. In other words, I’m not… but James Magnussen and a few billionaires appear to be.

“If they put up $1m for the 50 freestyle world record, I will come on board as their first athlete. I’ll juice to the gills and I’ll break it in six months.”

Ah, the romance of sport.

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Some thought-provoking post-first test commentary from a cricket-loving reader:

Wrote Gareth: “I’m sorry, I might be a bit old school, but the bodyline tactics (and let’s be honest, a 7-2 legside field has bodyline written all over it) were ugly, unimaginative, and mentally deficient. Bedingham should have been caught at first slip when he was on 2, but there was only a second slip in place, despite South Africa being four down and 450 away from victory. The fields set before we reverted to bodyline were not sufficiently attacking given the match situation for either the pace bowlers or spinners, even if the pitch was fairly flat. And it wasn’t like there was nothing in the pitch - there was enough there to keep the spinners interested, even if it was fairly slow turn.

“I accept that things have changed a lot since 1933 in terms of protective equipment and the range of shots a batter is willing to play, but in a game that is fundamentally about one person trying to stop another person from hitting the wickets with the ball, clearly trying not to hit those three pieces of wood is a bastardisation of the game.”

I’m not going to address the strategic elements of this as it pertained to the match situation. One of the great beauties of test cricket is that there are literally thousands of decisions taken each day that can be scrutinised, analysed and argued. Anyone who claims to own the last word on any of these decisions is probably not a lot of fun to be around at parties. It’s 100 percent fair play from Gareth to question whether the short-ball attack was the right approach to David Bedingham and Keegan Petersen for the reasons he listed, even if it did claim both their wickets.

I’m more interested in the scorching of the short-ball tactic itself. This is where Gareth and I diverge. I know a lot of people who feel similarly to him. To reiterate, I don’t own the last word on this, it’s just my opinion, but for what it’s worth…

I really don’t mind the tactic. I’d go further than that and say I think the rebirth of ‘bodyline’ (not the technically correct term because there were no field restrictions during Bodyline) is an interesting wrinkle in the game, one that has become even more fascinating as batters have become bolder to counter it.

Nothing about it suggests it should work. The short ball is the most regulated act in cricket. Since the mid-90s you’re only allowed to bowl two bouncers (above the shoulder) per over and since 1957 you can only station two fielders behind square on the leg side. 

So why has the tactic been successful? There are several reasons, not least because it was relatively novel when Neil Wagner (re)ignited it, batters are less inclined to leave and weave in the modern era, and analytics would have provided quite detailed models of where fields could be set to which lines of attack to cause maximum difficulty and discomfort.

Wagner knows… Getty Images

But it’s not novel anymore. If Wagner was the prototype, others have followed - Ben Stokes, Pat Cummins and Naseem Shah to name a few. There was even a benign attempt by Duanne Olivier to bounce Kane Williamson out at the Mount, though the latter had no trouble pulling and hooking the ball into the ground and into gaps.

In the past year or so, batters have started to use the 7-2 fields to their advantage, with Harry Brook putting Wagner into the mincer at Mt Maunganui last season and, for a time, Bedingham did that on Wednesday.

I find that more exhilarating than ugly, but each to their own.

The tactic can become boring. Of course it can. If I was a custodian of cricket rules, I’d advocate for the umpires to call wides more frequently for short-pitched bowling down leg side under the “negative bowling” statute, just like they do for left-arm orthodox spinners bowling over the wicket to right handers. Graeme Hick once suggested this after a Wagner barrage against Australia and he should have been listened to. 

I don’t, however, buy the idea that short bowling is any more “mentally deficient” than other broad-brush bowling tactics¹. If we’re going to stretch this argument to its limit, apart from the self-preservation aspect, how is trying to elicit mistakes from batters on the hook, pull and back-foot defence any different to bowling a sixth-stump line to a packed slips cordon and a 7-2 offside field where you’re looking for errors on the push, the drive and the forward defence? Both tactics are formulaic, only occasionally bring the stumps into play and can be tough to watch.

The major difference is we’re conditioned to think that the latter is how test cricket should be played, and the former isn’t.

I try not to get too hung up on what I think the game should look like because it narrows the possibilities of what it could look like. A generation ago an England captain was skewered for going out to a reverse sweep in a World Cup final after scoring 41 off 45 balls, while the bloke at the other end escaped any opprobrium for 58 in 103 balls. Mike Gatting, who made a mess of his attempted reverse against Allan Border, got blamed for England falling seven runs short of Australia’s total. Bill Athey didn’t because he scored his runs in a traditional manner. Recollections of that final still hinge around “Gatting’s moment of madness”, yet a couple of weeks ago an England captain gave licence to all his batters to reverse sweep three of the best spinners in the world in home conditions… in a test.

Things always change, and I love the game for it.

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As luck would have it, about five minutes after Paul Ford and I put out our final day BYC, Gary Stead announced that Daryl Mitchell would miss the second test and the T20 series against Australia.

According to Radio NZ, “Will Young is the only contender to replace Mitchell, who batted at number five at Bay Oval. Young, a specialist opener, could bat down the order or push one of the first-test openers - Devon Conway or Tom Latham - further down.”

Hmmm, if Stead and Tim Southee opt for four seamers, which is the norm in Hamilton, and they decide to retain Mitchell Santner, impressive at Mt Maunganui, the luckless Young might again find himself running drinks.

THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE

I am aware that Monday lunchtime is not the weekend, but I’m going to treat it like it is, with at least 1500 calories within arm’s reach as I settle in to watch the Super Bowl.

Here’s a good preview of the occasion, concentrating on the once hostile relationship between the NFL and Las Vegas, the host city, from Nevada Public Radio:

If the partnership between the National Football League and Las Vegas were a social media post, it could be described as “complicated”...

The Center for Business & Economic Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas said the Super Bowl generates about $160 million in sports wagering in Las Vegas every year. This year’s game could be record-breaking. With online betting, the American Gaming Association estimates nationwide wagering on the Super Bowl could exceed $23 billion.

But this profitable relationship started with plenty of rejections.

“Around 2004, Las Vegas tried to buy ad time on the Super Bowl and were told, no, we don’t want to be associated with it,” says UNLV history professor Michael Green.

Las Vegas Review Journal sports columnist Adam Hill said the NFL has made the city jump through plenty of hoops, even just to show the game. “The famous measuring of TVs is a part of lore here in Las Vegas, too,” Hill said.

Many years ago, casinos were restricted from showing the Super Bowl on television screens larger than 55 inches, leading to a scramble to measure TVs.

But eventually, Las Vegas was no longer off-limits. Hill said things changed because gambling was so lucrative, and the NFL realised it could profit from the relationship.

Sports gambling went from contemptible to acceptable.

As for the match, The Ringer has a bunch of good stuff, including this look at why 49ers’ coach Kyle Shanahan has more at stake than anybody else:

There might not be another person on the field or the sidelines Sunday night whose perception is more closely tied to the score of this game. This will be Shanahan’s fourth time coming within a game or two of winning the title since he began coaching the Niners, making this year’s attempt feel kind of like a pivotal fourth-and-goal. Football is famously a game of inches, but this result could swing Shanahan’s legacy in directions that are miles apart.

Being the Guy Who Just Can’t Win the Big One is a powerful sports archetype, which is why it’s also, by definition, a little unfair. The label is disproportionately applied to the athletes, teams, and coaches who are disciplined and talented (and lucky) enough to have not only gotten close to a Big One in the first place, but to have done so enough times to develop a track record. 

Mahomes knows... Getty Images

Here’s a nice read on Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes, a gunslinger plenty of people have been waiting on to fall:

For most of the season, the thinking in more than a few football circles went not just that Kansas City’s offence had finally decayed, or that its rivals were seemingly ascendant, but that Mahomes (for really the first time in his graced career) was out of immediate paths back to the sport’s peak, and so, like any aristocratic heir, he was in a state of borderline tantrum. It took half a decade, three conference championships, and two titles, but something approximating futility was at last wrapping its tentacles around him. If you listened close enough—not just in Missouri, Los Angeles, or Bristol, Connecticut, but in schoolyards, break rooms, and watering holes across the country—what you heard was some combination of resignation, glee, and certainty that Mahomes had finally seen the writing on the wall for this season.

This, of course, aged like milk. On Sunday, he’s back in the Super Bowl.

Kansas City v San Francisco, Super Bowl LVIII, Las Vegas, Monday 12.30pm, TVNZ+ and ESPN

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Two potentially good Six Nations clashes this weekend, with Scotland poised to offer their fans false hope once again as they take on a wounded France, while England welcomes Warren Gatland’s Wales to Twickenham.

Scotland v France, Edinburgh, Sunday 3.15am

England v Wales, London, Sunday 5.45am, both SS 1

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So far my Phoenix comeback consists of 1-1 and 0-0 draws. The kindest thing I can say is that they did not cause a spike in blood pressure. Once more unto the breach…

Wellington v Western United, Wellington, tomorrow 5.30pm, SS 2 

1. I might be alone in this, but I find Nathan Lyon bowling around the wicket to right-handers on bouncy Australian wickets to a packed legside field the most stultifying bowling tactic in the modern era.