Batting under the gun after horror tour
PLUS: School rugby in the news (again), NRL's Sunday gross out, SvG's genius and more.
Having sat through the best part of two of the three Hadlee-Chappell ODIs and dipped in and out of the dead-rubber third, I can say with a fair degree of pessimism that I’m not sure where this team is at presently, but it’s not a good place.
The performance graph is pointing in the wrong direction and there’s no easy way of righting it.
New Zealand lost the third match by 25 runs, never once giving the sense they had a workable plan to get to Australia’s competitive but hardly terrifying 267.
A couple of people have written in to suggest it’s time for a full-blown rebuild and while the sentiment is understandable it’s not realistic. There is no cavalry coming over the hill; there is no compelling youth movement to speak of in domestic cricket.
By and large, the bowling was its usual high standard on the sticky wickets in up-country Queensland.
It’s the batting that failed and where the pinch point is surely coming.
All the realistic plug-and-play options have been tried - Rachin Ravindra, Finn Allen, Will Young and Glenn Phillips - with varying degrees of success.
There are some good players on the A tour, like Tom Bruce, Joe Carter, Robbie O’Donnell, Mark Chapman and the keepers Dane Cleaver and Cam Fletcher. Some who’ve been tried, some waiting for an opportunity, but none who appeal as can’t-miss options at the next level.
On the youth front, you might add Katene Clark (22) and Jacob Cumming (18) to the list, but the former has consistency issues and the latter is just cutting his teeth in domestic cricket.
You can argue the toss over one spot, perhaps, but the best white-ball batters in the country were in Cairns. The problem is not who was there but what they did. They were awful, exemplified by the skipper scratching together 89 runs across the series at a miserable strike rate of less than one every two balls. It speaks volumes that he still somehow managed to be his team’s top scorer, despite the run-rate damage being done in the process.
Williamson put immense pressure on his middle order, but nobody in the batting lineup who played more than once came out of this tour with any credit.
Martin Guptill scored four runs across two innings and with his 36th birthday coming up this month, is hanging on to his international cricket by his fingertips.
Devon Conway (72 runs) knows now that cricket can be hard, but there’s not a lot to panic about there.
Williamson is an all-time great in a funk, with Andre Adams among other questioning whether it is time to hand over the reins. Captaining can be tough, as this tweet indicates.
My issue with Williamson stepping down is that I’m not sure the captain-elect should be an automatic selection in ODIs. To bolster my point, Tom Latham (53) continued his dreadful record against Australia (average 14.6).
The middle-order contributions from Daryl Mitchell, Michael Bracewell, James Neesham and Mitchell Santner were all patchy and inconsequential, and Glenn Phillips would have to consider himself mighty unlucky to get just the one bat having presumably slipped behind Bracewell in the pecking order.
It is the batting that is losing New Zealand games in all formats at the moment and there’s no quick fix.
On that cheerful note, we’ll leave cricket for the moment other than to mention England are going pretty well.
Can’t figure out whether I was engrossed or grossed out by last night’s savage NRL elimination final between hated neighbours Easts (they’ll always be Easts to me) and Souths.
I’m with Deb Spillane on this…
You can’t blame the ref, who dished out an astonishing seven cards, and obviously he’s doing that on instruction from the NRL, but every time I tune into an NRL match it feels like somebody is attacking somebody else’s head.
The only reasonable conclusion I can reach is that coaches do not care if those playing for them now end up eating their meals out of straws in care facilities when they’re 60 as long as they win now.
Memo: you can be tough without dropping your forearm into a prone player’s swede.
New Zealand Rugby’s intervention in school rugby is a fascinating, evergreen issue that has raised its head for the umpteenth time this weekend.
The issues in school rugby are real, particularly as they pertain to equitable resourcing and keeping boys in the game once they fall off the “high-performance pathways”, but what is NZR’s true motivation?
The organisation and its constituent unions have presided over the rapid decline of club rugby and the slide into irrelevance of the national provincial championship, so they are the best organisation to move into the sovereign spaces that are schools because…?
Nope, struggling to come up with a cogent playing and educational reason here, though I do note that school rugby is, sadly, a viable commercial entity with even more money-making potential should initiatives like a televised draft be introduced.
This is a story to keep an eye on.
Meanwhile, NZR’s winter of discontent extended into spring, with two losses in the World Cup sevens finals.
It might just be me, but the inclusion of sevens in the Olympics has added a bit of a don't-care factor to the rest of the circuit. I’ve never been a huge fan of the format, but this tournament sailed right on past my radar.
Speaking of interesting stories in Stuff over the weekend, here’s a little peek behind the executive curtain at Athletics New Zealand.
At the very least, such conflicts of interest are such a bad look and so easily avoidable with a set of robust policies that are adhered to.
Carlos Alvarez is going to win a lot of big tennis tournaments. He’s 19!
So is Iga Swiatek, who almost by stealth picked up her third grand slam this weekend. She’s 21!
At the other end of the high-performance sport age scale is Tom Brady. He is 45.
His Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Dallas Cowboys today. Of course they did.
On Friday, motorsport writer Eric Thompson celebrated the 60-year history of Pukekohe Raceway by recalling some of the great names that have graced the old-school track since it opened in 1963.
It was an impressive roll call, including Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees, Stirling Moss and those flying New Zealanders Bruce McLaren, Chris Amon and Denny Hulme, among many others.
In terms of pure driving ability, Shane van Gisbergen sits comfortably among those names. Sure, he was never built physically to fit into an F1 cockpit and although I know him as well as I know Kim Jong-un I’m informed that he might not have the personality to deal with the media and marketing circus that surrounds the big show.
All he does is drive the wheels off every moving object he sits behind the wheels of, skills that were again to the fore over the final Supercars weekend at Pukekohe.
Well off the pace after day one, finishing fifth in the first of three sprint races over the weekend after qualifying seventh, van Gisbergen was despondent about his chances as his Holden was well off the pace of the Mustangs.
He put it all together for a flying lap to secure pole for race two yesterday and essentially won wire to wire. However, he was starting eight for the final race at Pukekohe and with the super quick Will Davison on pole and plenty of quick traffic between them, even a podium seemed out of reach. That goal was even further away when a first corner crash at the back of the field saw the field inexplicably sit behind a safety car for a quarter of the race while the wall was repaired.
What followed was an assist from Davison, whose team butchered their pit stop, and an SvG masterclass. His battle with Cam Waters lit up a grey old afternoon, while his victory burnout threw a whole bunch of celebratory carbon into the air.
It was an emotional way to send the track out.
Otherwise, it was a fairly ho-hum weekend for motorsport.
Max Verstappen made no race of the Italian GP, making a mockery of this year’s championship.
Scott Dixon (12th) and Scott McLaughlin (6th) were non-factors in the season-ending IndyCar race, finishing the championship in a highly creditable third and fourth respectively, but the finale never provided the drama it was hoped for, with Australian Will Power finishing third and winning his second championship.
The 42-year-old Dixon says he’ll be back next year, chasing a record-equalling seventh championship and another Indy 500.
THIS WEEK
No newsletter tomorrow but there will be one on Wednesday including one of the best first-person New Zealand cricket essays I’ve had the pleasure of reading, by former first-class player Justin Paul. If you’ve ever harboured a sporting dream, it’s worth the price of admission on its own.
I’m also trying to stitch something so I don’t have to use Twitter for images going forward.
Feels more and more to me like the WTC final victory was Kane's Everest. Since then, he's scored a solitary score of 50+ in 20 innings for NZ across all formats (the World T20 final), put up the worst statistical batting effort in IPL history, and generally looked tired. Fatherhood, injury, illness, COVID, potentially lack of support/leadership from his coach...you count out champions at your peril, but I'm interested to see where Kane goes from here, even if he is 'only' 32
Great read thanks Dylan. Silver Lake and NZR boys thinking our 1st XV rugby gonna be like college football in USA feeding into the NFL? A draft for the Super clubs? Well the Super 8 would have to be the SEC given how often that conference wins the Top4! Hamilton = Alabama? Hastings = Clemson? How long before they want their own television deal (or network) LOL. Seriously though, having been to that tournament as a spectator for many years now, I am
already seeing a growing division in the boys 1st XV’s - South Island teams can’t seem to foot it with the teams up here at that tourney (some big boys up here) - which ever NI schools turn up, they tend to physically dominate the south’s teams and it’s getting more noticeable. Even Wellington 1st XV’s seem to struggle against the super 8 sides in games I have seen over last few years. Northern drift!