Cricket is back! Kind of, almost...
And so is the NBA! PLUS: Book Club has a classic of a long-lamented genre and a reader asks, 'Would Norrie have made it here?'
The World T20 is upon us and although it’s only the preliminary stages, there’s already been some fun and games with Scotland turning over Bangladesh and Ireland’s Curtis Campher taking a weird double-hattrick in their win against the Netherlands.
The top two from each preliminary group take their places among the eight teams already through to the main draw, which is split into two pools of six.
At this stage, Scotland and Ireland are projected to join New Zealand’s pool that also includes Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, while Sri Lanka and Bangladesh would join England, Australia, the West Indies and South Africa, though there is another round of matches before this is confirmed.
We talk all things World T20 on this week’s BYC, and a bit of nonsense as well - as you’d expect. There’s also a nod to Rachel Priest’s stunning intervention in the WBBL, and a bit of Fred Goodall chat, remembered here by Stuff’s Ian Anderson following his passing this week.
Elsewhere, here’s a nice Chris Rattue interview with Ish Sodhi, the leggie who will need to be on top of his game if New Zealand are to progress to the semifinals.
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THE NBA season got underway today with last season’s champion Milwaukee Bucks hosting this season’s favourites, the Brooklyn Nets. The result was a relatively comfortable victory for Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks but with such a sprawling season it’d be crazy to read too much into game one of 82.
Steven Adams is suiting up this week for the Memphis Grizzlies, the third stop in his career after being traded from the New Orleans Pelicans. It is easy to forget that Adams is still just 28, playing a position, centre, where the best practitioners tend to mature late. The New Zealander is seen as a defensive upgrade on the man he was traded for, Jonas Valanciunas, though the Lithuanian’s 17 points-per-game will have to come from elsewhere. Led by the dynamic Ja Morant, the Grizzlies come in midway in ESPN’s exhaustive pre-season rankings, which are worth a read if you want to dive into the season head first.
The rankings are logical except ESPN has the Celtics way too low at 13 and the Lakers way too high at 3, but that might be personal bias.
The story dominating the start of the season, however, is Australian Ben Simmons and the way he is burning the bridges that hold together his fragile relationships at the Philadelphia 76ers. This is big news, so big that the venerable Philadelphia Inquirer ran an opinion piece in the prime real estate on its homepage headlined: “Enough B.S. Suspend Ben Simmons indefinitely.” It’s paywalled and I suspect there won’t be many of you with a subscription to the Inquirer so I won’t link it, but you get the drift from the headline and the teaser, which reads: “You can’t trade Simmons at this moment. He has zero value. Let him stew, make him return, play him at power forward, reestablish his worth, and then ship him off.”
That is a love affair that went south in a hurry.
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A READER asked: “Would [Cameron Norrie] have achieved this while still based in NZ? Pretty amazing really,” he wrote, referencing Norrie’s first Masters 1000 title when winning Indian Wells this week.
I replied that it was highly unlikely, citing a recent documentary - Untold: Breaking Point (Netflix) - that told the story of Mardy Fish and along the way showed how tough it was to make it in men’s tennis even from the US these days, with most of the talent centred around Europe.
Norrie’s parents moved from South Africa to New Zealand around the turn of the century, when Cameron was three, and he represented New Zealand as a junior before switching allegiance to the United Kingdom at 16. It’s pretty damn hard to argue against the decision.
You can read more about Norrie’s remarkable rise in this BBC feature.
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I’M double-vaxxed against Covid-19. It was a no-brainer for me, but I understand nobody wants to hear a sports hack proselytise about global health issues so I’ll leave it at this: I am genuinely staggered that a coach would choose to torch his career rather than work to ensure the health and safety of the programme he was paid millions to care about.
“While I have made my own decision, I respect that every individual - including coaches, staff and student-athletes - can make his or her own decision regarding the Covid-19 vaccine. I will not comment further on my decision,” said Nick Rolokovich, the Washington State University American football coach who was sacked for his anti-vax stance this week.
If you’re going to make a decision like that, which impacts so many people that were relying on you, the least you can do is explain your rationale, surely?
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The New York Times sent their football man in England to Newcastle’s first home game under Saudi ownership. It was an eye-popping experience (via NZ Herald [$]). These two paragraphs are delicious.
There is an adaptability that comes with having no moral compass. Not only can soccer tolerate almost any twist, no matter how improbable, it can also do so in a matter of hours, turning what might once have been unthinkable into the way things have always been in the space of a 90-minute game. How else could nation states use the Premier League as a proxy stage for their geopolitical strategies?
And yet, at St James' Park on Sunday afternoon, even as reality bit, it was impossible to escape the strangeness of the whole scene. There were the children, outside, with their homemade headdresses. There were the teenagers with the Saudi flag cast across their shoulders. There were the men in robes, adulation for their new owners in the form of cultural appropriation.
Here, also, is a good summation of the other 19 clubs’ (actually, really only 18 as Manchester City are aware of the potential for hypocrisy) angst over the sale and its implications.
MIDWEEK BOOK CLUB
What is it? Caribbean Crusade
Who wrote it? DJ Cameron
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (1972)
Genre: Touring book
Reviewer: Dylan Cleaver
Don Cameron was wrapping up his career at the New Zealand Herald around about the time I was taking my first tentative steps into sports journalism. For years his byline dominated cricket here and his affinity for the sport can be read in the pages of this book, which follows the New Zealand team to the West Indies in 1972, an epic 15-match (five tests) tour that began at the start of February and ended in mid-April. Cameron was covering the tour for the Press Association, so his words went everywhere, not just the Herald.
One of the truly remarkable feats of Caribbean Crusade was getting Sir Garfield (Garry) Sobers to write the foreword, given his obvious disdain for the type of cricket played on the tour. Although he describes playing New Zealand as a “thrill and a pleasure”, you don’t have to read too hard between the lines to get a sense of what he really felt.
“Although the New Zealanders played their own way I don’t think it is for us to criticise. They set out to do a job and they did it adequately,” he damned with faint praise. “When they start playing strokes - and they have got the players to do this - New Zealand will be a cricket nation to be reckoned with.”
(This was the tour Glenn Turner notched two test double tons and gave the impression that he got off the plane all padded up and had barely taken them off before boarding for home.)
Cameron’s book is a cricket-focused stroll through the tour, with the series being drawn 0-0 and painfully slow batting dominating ball, it is a wonder he sold any books at all, but it remains a favourite on my shelf, one I pull out from time to time for droll lines like this: “At a late stage of the tour I had prepared up-to-date and tolerably accurate averages and, in case anyone was interested, took them to the dinner table. Some of the players were interested. Hedley Howarth was not. ‘They are only figures, they don’t mean anything,’ said Howarth before returning to his soup.”
Or this, from the first morning of the first test at Jamaica, after Sobers had won the toss and chose to bat.
“Suddenly there was a baying roar from the packed stands, a sharp staccato thunderclap of tumult as the Jamaicans jumped with glee… It was a gay, crazy scene.”
Television killed the touring book, which was probably for the best, but Caribbean Crusade is a reminder of a gentler, bat-and-pad-together era.
PRIZE RE-CAP: FINAL WEEK
Another reminder that to celebrate The Bounce’s first month, I’m giving away a signed Kane Williamson ODI playing cap with his Black Caps number - 161 - embroidered on the side. It even comes with genuine lint attached.
To enter, you have to be a paying subscriber, follow @dylancleaver3 on Instagram, like any of the relevant prize posts and tag one friend you think might be interested in either the cap or The Bounce (or both!).
Entries close on October 28 and the winner will be announced October 29.