Back to the bad old days
The Week That Was features Colin Munro and the Weekend That Will Be forecasts misery on the horizon.
There was a really interesting story on Australian website codesports.com.au last week.
The crux of the story, headlined “Hamilton Boys’ High School is the centre of a league vs union showdown” ($), comes in the first two pars:
The runaway success of the Warriors has reignited a code war in New Zealand with rugby bosses accused of attempting to derail the club’s pathway programme.
A major sponsor of the prestigious Hamilton Boys’ High School’s 1st XV… is considering pulling its funding amid allegations students are being pressured into turning their backs on the Warriors’ junior system.
The sponsor, Apex Property Group, also supports the Warriors academy in Hamilton and the co-founder was appalled to learn that as many as five talented young oval-ball athletes at Hamilton BHS were told they would not make the 1st XV if they didn’t cut ties to the academy.
If true (HBHS was approached for comment by CODE but did not return calls), this is a massive own goal for the school and rugby, even if the tactic was remarkably successful, particularly traditional boys schools, for close to a hundred years.
Times have changed, however.
HBHS have been at the vanguard of what I would describe as a move towards an over-the-top, hyper-charged secondary school sports scene, where professional practices - such as recruitment and specialisation - are introduced into the education sector.
Where you can try to convince me that school sport has not become a Frankenstein’s monster is when you point to the direct link to professional pathways and the opportunities afforded to your student athletes. After all, why should the dream of being a professional sportsman or woman be looked at any differently to the dream of being a cardiothoracic surgeon?
But taking these kids and putting them in high-performance pathways and then putting a roadblock on one of the most logical paths just seems stupid - and more than a little tawdry.
THE WEEK THAT WAS
The Bounce was surprised to see a press release drop from NZC this morning, announcing the retirement of Colin Munro.
Mostly because it felt like he was already long gone. Well, it didn’t just feel like this, it was actually thus, with his last appearance coming in 2020.
That wasn’t the biggest surprise though: Munro played 123 internationals for his adopted country. If you’d ask me to guess before logging onto Statsguru, I might have guessed 80 max. That figure alone demonstrates to me what an extraordinary amount of cricket gets played these days, but add it to the 428 games of professional T20 he has played - 428!
I have plenty of thoughts about Munro, most of them revolving around the idea that successive New Zealand regimes never got the best of his talent.
I always got the sense that Munro was a dodecahedron-shaped peg trying to fit into a square hole when it came to the Black Caps. He just had too many sharp edges for the cool cats who dominated the dressing room. Playing in many different dressing rooms and many different cultures probably mellowed him, but by that time he was largely out of sight and out of the selectors’ minds.
That being said, you can compare him to others and make a strong case that he was treated poorly. The guy averaged more than 50 in first-class cricket, but got just one test on a horror tour to South Africa (it was the all-out-for-45 tour, though he didn’t play that test), nicked out first ball in the first dig, got 15 in the second, both batting at No 7, and was never tried again. Tough gig.
Knowing he was always on the periphery, Munro made the decision to be a T20 gun for hire and has done that, for the most part, exceedingly well. Certainly well enough to have played for his country in the past four years. His last seven T20I scores were 30, 46, 59, 26, 14, 64 and 15. That’s 254 runs at a strike rate of 143.
Even at 37, he’s a better T20 player than some who are going to the Caribbean.
This is a good, entry-level look into the complexities involved when sports set up their own integrity units. This yarn looks at the International Tennis Integrity Agency, and in particular its cases against alleged performance-enhancing dopers like two-time Grand Slam winner Simona Halep.
As a general rule, I have little to no sympathy for PED cheats, and even after reading of the travails of these players, I still have a lot of inherent suspicion.
For example, Poland’s former world number 75 Kamil Majchrzak was banned for 13 months after failing a doping test in 2022, right in the midst of the most productive period of his career. It was later discovered the anabolic steroid came from a ‘herbal’ nutritional drink he was taking that didn’t list the banned substance on the packet. As a professional athlete in a sport with strict anti-doping protocols, it is incumbent upon you not to take any diet supplements without doing everything in your power to check they’re legit.
So little sympathy there, but where sports including tennis must get way better is streamlining the process, including appeals, so careers are not irrevocably ruined when bad rulings are made.
Halep, 32, missed 17 months of what is likely to be the twilight of her career. That was how long she had been barred for when her initial four-year ban was reduced on appeal - to a suspension shorter than the time she had already served.
That is just plain wrong.
I’ve long been intrigued by the oversized output of sporting talent from the Balkans when it comes to the two most ‘popular’ sports1 in the world.
Croatia, a country of just over four million people, has made the semifinals of the Fifa World Cup three times, and the final once. That’s nuts when you think Brazil has 54 times the amount of people, Germany 20 and Argentina 11.
In basketball, the influence is profound, with Serbian Nokola Jokic picking up his third NBA MVP this week. Slovenian Luca Dončić was third in MVP voting and is on target to become a top 10 scorer in NBA history. Add to that the likes of Nikola Vucevic, Jusuf Nurkic, the unrelated Bogdan and Bojan Bogdanovic, Nikola Mirotic, Goran Drajic, Peja Stojakovic, Vlade Divac, Dino Radja, Toni Kukoc, Drazen Petrovic and many others, and you get an idea of the extraordinary seam of talent the Blaknas have to mine (as this Ringer piece from last year details).
Every good topic needs a great origin story, and I devoured this one from ESPN.
Well over a half-century before Jokic raised the Larry O’Brien Trophy, the sport barely registered across the [Balkan] region, until one player helped ignite a revolution that reshaped its future and set the foundation for countless players to follow…
That player was named Radivoj Korać, and just like Jokic, he called the town of Sombor home.
It’s a lovely story with a tragic thread, with Korać, who I’d never heard of, at the heart of it.
If the Balkan basketball phenomenon interests you, I’d recommend taking a dive into the geopolitical tensions that engulfed the golden generation of the late-80s.
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
Just a few of the things I’ll try to get in front of this weekend
Genuinely looking forward to this encounter and not just in a I-write-a-sports-newsletter-so-it-would-be-remiss-not-to-include-rugby way. One v two, a derby, afternoon kickoff - ticks most of the boxes apart from this nagging feeling that nothing much matters until the playoffs start.
To push back on that feeling immediately, the following fixture does come with plenty of jeopardy. The quality might be lacking though, if the previous 10 rounds are anything to go by.
Blues v Hurricanes, Auckland, tomorrow 4.35pm, SS1
Highlanders v Crusaders, Dunedin, tomorrow 7.05pm, SS1
In what I hope will be a reverse curse of spectacular proportions, let The Bounce be the first to tell you the Warriors have no chance of breaking out of their more-than-a-mini-slump on Sunday. No chance in hell. Nope, not happening.
All silliness aside, one of the big talking points leading up to the clash against the Roosters is the online abuse received by referee Kasey Badger this week.
Badger, 37, has copped onfield abuse and a subsequent social media barrage this week, after her performance during the Wests Tigers-Canterbury Bulldogs fixture, when she placed six players on report for a variety of charges.
I haven’t lowered myself into the pit to read any of the trolling, but I can imagine there’s an “edge” to it that differs from the everyday run-of-the-mill referee abuse.
Eastern Suburbs v NZ Warriors, Sydney, Sunday 4pm, SS4
I enjoyed this miserablist2 take from Andrew Voerman, who ranked the Phoenix A-League playoff eliminations from least painful to excruciating. Worst of the bunch was the 0-1 loss to Perth in Sydney in 2020, with Voerman writing:
The Phoenix were flying high, having won four in a row after a 3-0 trouncing of Melbourne Victory at home. They were arguably the best team in A-League Men. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, the closure of New Zealand’s borders and a four-month wait for their next match. When A-League Men resumed, they won just one of their six remaining matches to stumble into the playoffs.
Stuck in Australia, the Phoenix didn’t get the home advantage they should have for finishing third, then fell behind early against Perth Glory. Despite finishing with 67 percent possession and taking 31 shots, the Phoenix couldn’t find a way past Liam Reddy in the Glory goal and a season that promised so much ended in pain.
Melbourne Victory v Wellington, leg 1 of 2, Melbourne, Sunday 6pm, SS3
The critical match of the Premier League season is a make-up game in midweek, when a sinking Spurs side host Manchester City, but the importance of that fixture might be diluted if their neighbours can spring a shock in the early hours of Monday.
Manchester United v Arsenal, Old Trafford, Monday 3.30am, SS EPL
There’s a top-of-the-table clash in the ANZ Premiership, when the Pulse meet the team representing Canterbury with the terrible name I refuse to write in Palmy North. The NBA and NHL playoffs (ESPN) get closer to the sharper end, and those of you with a VPN can continue to track the Giro d’Italia into its second week, with Tadej Pogacar looking irresistible already. IndyCars hit Indianapolis, but for the road course, not the famous oval.
By a lot of metrics (fans, online engagement, searches) cricket is the second-most popular team sport in the world, but its numbers are boosted by its overwhelming dominance in the world’s most populous country. In terms of global reach beyond the subcontinent diaspora, basketball is widely accepted as more popular.
Not actually a word, but it should be.
Agree 100% with your comments re: Munro Dylan. I remember when he came in the scene and decimated domestic attacks and in his early commentating years Craig McMillan waxing lyrical about him. Also recall that test debut and him bowling serviceable medium pace outswingers. He looked like “a cricketer”. I think it was pretty well known that he was abrasive and if you’re not in the “in crowd” that’s always dangerous, sadly NZC didn’t seem to navigate that well. There was a brief period where McCullum backed him. He did have a tendency to swing across full straight balls and get out but if he’d been backed by NZC you feel he would have gone further.
What's wrong with the Tactix?