Clash of the Code
PLUS: The Week That Was and the Weekend That Will Be
New Zealand Rugby’s Wall Planner Fail dominated the week, so much so that it was left to All Blacks coach Ian Foster to beg everybody to “move on”.
That just happened to be what many in the rugby community were hoping Foster would do in early August.
Swings and roundabouts.
Here at The Bounce Towers, we have a smidgen of sympathy for NZR’s top brass. We’ve converted a kitchen cupboard into a blackboard/diary and I’ll tell you this for free, life comes at you fast.
Even with the blackboard and two calendar apps on my phone, I’m prone to missing my “alerts”, so I completely understand how you could miss the quarter-final involving one of your flagship teams in a tournament you’re hosting.
Probably happens all the time.
Let’s clear up one misconception, though. In the shallow waters of the Twitter Sea I’ve seen people defending NZR because they couldn’t have known World Rugby would draw the Black Ferns in the second of four quarter-final slots. Wrong. The home team, New Zealand, was always getting the Saturday evening slot so long as they qualified for the quarter-finals. They have known for months that this is when the Black Ferns play, given it was as close to a certainty as you can get that they would qualify for the knockout rounds.
To be fair to NZR, and it’s very hard to be fair to them at the moment, they haven’t pushed this misconception themselves, but that’s about all they have going for them in this particular kerfuffle.
It’s also hard to accept they’re really that bothered with the clash when Mark Robinson will be in Tokyo this weekend, not Whangarei. Now I get that to a degree - Tokyo has the Sky Tree Tower, Whangarei the Kauri Clock Factory - but it aptly demonstrates what event is more commercially important to NZR’s power brokers.
In a Spinoff story headlined, “All Blacks vs Black Ferns: Incompetence from NZR even worse than malevolence”, Madeleine Chapman writes: “This feels worse than if it was revealed to be some strange attempt to sabotage its own team. At least a deliberate sabotage implies that NZR thought about the Black Ferns for more than five seconds when making decisions.”
Kapow!
THE WEEK THAT WAS
When people look back on the impact of the digital revolution they will likely brush over the global impact of the Plunket Shield being streamed live on YouTube. Big mistake. It’s changed my life for the better and with a bit of luck we might even get two fixed cameras with some automatic zoom features at the ground before long.
One thing it has highlighted for me is that New Zealand’s carefully crafted nice-guys image does not trickle down to the first-class scene. Well, not entirely. Some of the behaviour from dismissed batters in the just completed Auckland v Central Districts round two match (innings victory to the good guys, thank you very much) was unacceptable.
Yes, some of the decisions looked ropey. There were leg-befores against Bayley Wiggins and George Worker, and a caught behind off Dane Cleaver that looked like nailed-on shockers.
When you get sawn off it’s human nature to be disappointed. When Plunket Shield first-class cricket is reduced to a maximum of 16 innings per player - only 10 players had 13 or more innings last season and none the full 16 - each injustice feels like a mortal blow.
The disappointment, the throwing of the head back and the swearing under your breath just loud enough for the umpires to register is excusable in the circumstances. Standing your ground and having to be crowbarred from the crease is not. (Only Ben Smith had any excuse for needing to be crowbarred from the crease - oof!)
NZC should be sending a sharply worded memo to all players. I can help with the wording: “When the umpire’s finger goes up, suck it up and GTF out of there.”
School rugby was back in the news, which I covered off yesterday ($) or, if you’re a free subscriber, you can catch-up with it on The Spinoff.
One of the common refrains you hear on this subject is that we should hand the running of teenage rugby below 1st XV level back to the clubs. There is a romantic element to this that is appealing but it stops short of addressing the real issues behind teenage participation drop-offs, which are fuelled just as much by societal factors as they are the recent “pathway” emphasis of some schools.
Those elements include the myriad recreation and lifestyle choices available to kids, particularly those in urban centres; the rigidity of team sports’ practice and game schedules; an increasing awareness of safety aspects; Saturday shopping that means far more youth employed; costs of gear and fees, and so on.
Schools remain, by and large, the best place to play sport because you have a captive audience (teens have to go to school), on-site sporting facilities and decades worth of experience in providing a range of sports and games for students, even as the number of teacher-coaches has dropped.
In fact, clubs have massive issues of their own, the biggest being the increasing need to convince not just teens but the general public that they’re vibrant, inclusive, healthy places to hang out at.
I am not basing this on any data but rather intuition, but I believe we’re only a generation or two from standalone single- or dual-sport (rugby and cricket, usually) clubs all but disappearing or becoming unviable.
Community sports hubs are the future. On another day, I’ll provide more detail as to what they may look like.
Skiing is a sport I used to enjoy before it became too difficult, first logistically and now physically. The last few times the family has attempted ski weekends at the Ruapehu fields they have been an expensive waste of time with either no snow or closed lifts. After the last failed attempt, in those innocent pre-Covid times, we resolved to spend a little extra and fly south, but what it has meant in reality is that we just don’t ski any more.
I know I’m not alone in giving up on North Island skiing. This is an excellent piece by Scott MacLean on Sportsfreak about the decline, fall and potential rise again of the Ruapehu fields. (h/t to Sport Review for the find).
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
What I’ll be tuned and attuned to this weekend.
See lead item above.
NZ v Wales, QF2, Whangarei, tomorrow 7.30pm, Spark Sport & Three
Plus:
France v Italy, QF 1, Whangarei, tomorrow 4.30pm, Spark Sport
England v Australia and Canada v USA, QF 3 & 4, Auckland, Sunday 1.30pm and 4.30pm, Spark Sport (QF 3 also on Three)
Also, see lead item above (again).
Japan v All Blacks, Tokyo, tomorrow 9.30pm (replay), Sky Sport 2
The World T20 has been great and terrible, the latter thanks to Australia’s big wet. New Zealand will be cursing the abandonment of their game against Afghanistan, which they would have been short-priced favourites to win. England’s shock loss to Ireland in a truncated match on the same day at the same ground has tightened Group 1 up considerably.
More rain is forecast for Melbourne tonight, but if we get a game it couldn’t be any more pivotal, whereas the weather is set fair for Sydney tomorrow.
P.S. What must it feel like to be a Pakistan cricket fan, losing two final-ball thrillers in five days.
Australia v England, Melbourne, tonight 9pm, Sky Sport 3
NZ v Sri Lanka, Sydney, tomorrow 9pm, Sky Sport 3
India v South Africa, Perth, Monday 12am, Sky Sport 3
It’s such a poor slate of matches at the Rugby League World Cup, though the Monday morning match-up could be tasty.
NZ v Ireland, tomorrow, 7.30am, Spark Sport
France v Samoa, Monday 6am, Spark Sport
I find the mastery of SvG impossible to ignore. He’ll most likely have wrapped up the title on the streets of Surfer’s Paradise on Saturday, but even if the championship is sealed he doesn’t know how to ease off, so Sunday will be just as compelling as he looks to set a new benchmark for wins in a season.
Supercars race 32, Gold Coast, Sunday 5.15pm, Sky Sport 5
There’s a couple of things you might want to keep half an eye on. The World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros starts tomorrow (ESPN), while the Black Sticks men play India in back to back tests overnight and in the early hours of Sunday morning (2.40am start, Spark Sport).
Yes, madness. As you say, understandable, but still madness.
A few years ago the local football club, missing a clubhouse, asked the bowls club about a commercial arrangement for winter after-match functions in the bowls bar. This was declined because of a few bowls members who wanted a Saturday night drink.
These clubs rely a lot on a diminishing number of dedicated but aging or time-poor volunteers, competing for sparse revenue, foregoing an opportunity to cut overheads through economies of scale, wasting the chance to recruit each other's members, and missing out on creating a broad-based community hub that goes beyond sport.
I think it's a model that is starting to prove its value e.g. Elmwood, Papatoetoe. I believe it stands the best chance of giving grassroots sports a boost, including connecting with local high schools to transition leavers into their next sports community. I don't see anything from Sports NZ that recognises this as a strategy they should resource, beyond providing a Yammer network, but maybe I'm missing something.
One of the issues with rugby at school/club level is the season is too short. Early spring and all those kids are now playing basketball, because rugby is over.