CWC23: Goliath v Goliath
The next Black Caps off the block, RWC's tiresome fallout, and some great writing from the US
Oh yay, let all neutrals rejoice.
It’s the behemoth versus the leviathan in the World Cup final.
Superpower A meets Superpower B.
The Sons of Packer on a collision course with the Sons of Doordashan.
Pick your poison.
While it might be a final lacking the romantic David v Goliath ideal, in India and Australia, the two best teams have reached the final.
Or, to phrase it more accurately, the by-far-and-away best team, India, has made the final where they will play the team that was slightly more proficient than a shortlist of sides who mostly lived up to their clichés.
South Africa - talented but semifinal cursed.
New Zealand - well-organised overachievers.
Pakistan - notoriously mercurial.
England - lots of noise, not enough heat.
The two semifinals couldn’t not have provided more of a contrast.
On the Arabian Sea under clear skies and in the colosseum-like confines of Wankhede Stadium, India pummelled New Zealand in a run-fest that was a bit closer than the eventual 70-run margin suggests1.
On the Bay of Bengal under soupy skies at Eden Gardens, which was until recently Indian cricket’s vast and most holy cathedral, Australia and South Africa engaged in a low-scoring scrap that was a lot closer than it ever should have been.
Where both matches were similar was in that they were effectively won, with a few detours, in the 10-over powerplay.
Semifinal 1: India 84 for 1; New Zealand 46 for 2.
Semifinal 2: South Africa 18 for 2; Australia 74 for 2.
And that folks, is how to win a one-day international.
New Zealand fans cannot have too many complaints about the team’s performance or placing, on the whole. Despite Kane Williamson’s assertion there’s more life left yet in this iteration of the Black Caps, this did feel like the end of something and while they might get another World Test Championship cycle out of largely the same group of players, the white-ball sides face a period of renewal.
This was one of the oldest squads at the World Cup and the seam attack looked every one of its years.
It is difficult to see any of the following being around for CWC27: Trent Boult, Tim Southee, Lockie Ferguson, Tom Latham, Ish Sodhi and James Neesham. I’d also put a question mark around Kane Williamson, Matt Henry, Devon Conway and Daryl Mitchell, though the latter three are better placed to play well into their mid-30s because they have 116, 89 and 113 international caps respectively across all formats, as opposed to the former who has 346.
Here’s a preposterously early and possibly misguided punt on five contenders for the Black Caps squad at the 2027 World Cup.
Muhammad Abbas: A bold call for a guy yet to play a List A match, but Abbas has made such a dynamic impression at both age-group level and in his early forays into Plunket Shield, that it seems only a matter of time before he dons full national colours. As an aside I watched the live YouTube stream of his innings at Eden Park Outer Oval today and while there is a lot to tidy up - he is way too loose outside off - there is a lot to like about his shot-making (over)confidence.
Dean Foxcroft: Bowled first ball in his only ODI, Foxcroft’s Statsguru numbers don’t leap off the page, but the South African-born right-hander’s raw talent is highly regarded and his offspin is a work in progress. Has shades of Michael Bracewell about him.
Ben Sears: New Zealand needs to develop some out-and-out pace options with both Lockie Ferguson and Adam Milne struggling to stay fit, Wellingtonian Sears appeals as a potentially more robust option. He has been gently introduced to international cricket via two T20Is each in Mirpur, Edinburgh and The Hague, taking six wickets across those matches.
Mitch Hay: Tom Latham is a very fine cricketer but his limitations as an ODI batter were evident when he was wheeled out at No5 in the semifinal against India and it was neither beneficial nor particularly harmful when he was dismissed for a second-ball duck. Dane Cleaver and Tim Seifert have considerable white-ball batting skills, but at just 23, Hay has the most upside (and the advantage of being based in Canterbury).
Aditya Ashok: Was given a taste of international cricket-lite with a T20I in the UAE. Will play a lot more and while like-minded purists might prefer to see his development funnelled towards the red-ball game, you suspect the lure of T20 riches will see him tailor his game to suit.
Back to Ahmedabad and the final…
The Telegraph’s venerable Scyld Berry has picked both Rachin Ravindra and Daryl Mitchell in an imaginary World XI to take on India ($), but says India would still beat them anyway.
I find it hard to disagree with the idea, though Australia tends to find ways where other teams can’t.
Narendra Modi Stadium has been a hard ground to set competitive totals on - at four matches at this total the team batting first has averaged 252.5 runs and has lost three times.
I’m picking India, but not with as much conviction as I felt a week or so ago.
India v Australia, CWC final, Ahmedabad, Sunday 9.30pm, SS1
THE WEEK THAT WAS
I’ve deliberately skipped over the “furore” surrounding the “admission” from World Rugby that the TMO erroneously cancelled out Aaron Smith’s try in that World Cup final.
Sorry, but I’m past caring. I said my piece about TMO intrusion at the time and I’m not sure what good it does to endlessly relitigate it. Bill Beaumont is not going to show up at NZR’s head office on Molesworth St this summer and go: “You know what chaps, I’ve had a think about it and here’s the Webb Ellis Cup. You deserve it.”
If you’re going to read one piece on the silliness, I’d suggest Marc Hinton in Stuff has the most sensible take, making the critical point that Beauden Barrett’s try (in itself a bit dodgy) is a direct result of the Aaron Smith no-try. He doesn’t make the point, but could, that despite the protocols not being followed correctly, it WAS a knock on.
Clearly, in a one-point result you can pore through the tape and find any number of events, decisions or no-calls that could potentially have changed the outcome. Potentially is the key word here. One event begets another in sport. Entire timelines change because of certain outcomes.
For the same reasons as above, I was only mildly interested in Wayne Barnes’ clapping back at Graham Henry in his biography, Throwing the Book. Henry did deserve it, though. I remember reading his book Final Word at the time and thinking, how is he going to avoid a lawsuit here? These two abridged paragraphs in particular still jar.
It was painfully obvious to Graham that the referee and his touch judges had effectively adjudicated on only one team, and that team wasn’t France. No wonder the French official had commented to him in their dressing room that they had got away with murder. The French… kept blatantly infringing… blissfully secure in the knowledge they weren’t going to be penalised.
Weird thoughts began to course through Graham’s head. ‘Could sports betting be a factor?’, he wondered…
Henry did conclude that sports betting wasn’t a factor, but even leaving it out there. Whoa! You can probably understand why Barnes has sat on this grudge for a long time.
“Someone that senior and with that much influence saying something like that is pretty s***** and could have had huge ramifications for me and the game of rugby.
“I can forgive someone saying something horrible in the heat of the moment, but he’d had five years to think about it, and an editor must have said to him at some point, ‘Do you really want to write that?’.”
This is a wonderfully excoriating feature on baseball’s collective ownership and particularly that of the Oakland A’s John Fisher. MLB owners have voted unanimously to allow Fisher to relocate the A’s from Oakland to Las Vegas.
It will be the third and final of Oakland’s big professional sports franchises to leave the East Bay, with the Raiders also moving to Las Vegas and the Golden State Warriors decamping across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. At some point in all of their histories, they have been the best at their business, with the Raiders having won three Super Bowls, two while based in Oakland, Golden State Warriors winning five NBA championships (four while in Oakland), and the A’s winning nine World Series (four while in Oakland).
While surrounded by great prosperity and some great universities like UC Berkeley and St Mary’s, Oakland is a comparatively poor city with a large African-American population and Vegas is, well, Vegas, Baby.
The other issue was the crumbling concrete edifice that was the dual-purpose Coliseum2. Municipal leaders didn’t want to pour taxpayer money to improve it for football and/or baseball unless they could get guarantees from owners that they wouldn’t eventually move the team.
Still, the decision has sat poorly among those who champion the underdog, as the ESPN story outlines.
In Oakland, which is on the verge of losing all three of its major professional sports teams in a span of five years, it always feels personal. There’s something about the city and its people that guys like [owner] Fisher and [MLB commissioner Rob] Manfred will never understand. Fisher - Gap scion, shadow-dweller, principal owner of the A’s since 2015 - loves to tout his Bay Area roots, but he was born into a life of East Coast boarding schools, Princeton and squash courts. Oakland was never his thing…
Fisher didn’t attend games in Oakland after the April decision to leave town, but Las Vegas will provide him with the proper remove. If all goes according to plan, there will be a sufficient number of luxury suites that generate a sufficient amount of revenue for him to go, if he chooses, without fear of encountering the unsavoury aspects of the real world.
The author leaves his best shots until last, however, with an extended outro that has a pay-off line that is both savage and really quite poetic all at once.
Maybe this is baseball’s hope. Fisher will go to Vegas and become someone or something else. He’ll raise his payroll and keep his good players and treat his customers as if they matter. He’ll wander The Strip and mingle with the people and wear a $5 tank top and try to open a beer bottle with his eye socket. The stands will be full, the team will romp to victory and everyone will wonder why Major League Baseball didn’t ditch Oakland sooner. At this point, there’s no way to refute any of it. Anything and everything is possible. But there’s always been an undeniable truth about Vegas: Eventually, you have to go home to who you’ve always been.
The least I can do is not wear my GAP hoodie anymore.
Speaking of Vegas, three-time F1 champion Max Verstappen is distinctly unimpressed with the latest effort to sell his sport to the Americans.
Per One News:
[Verstappen] called this weekend's race “99 percent show, and 1 percent sporting event” while complaining he felt like “a clown” standing on the stage during this week’s opening ceremony that featured multiple musical acts.
The driver expected to win his 18th win of the season — sixth in a row — then skipped a VIP party at The Wynn which F1 president Stefano Domenicali asked all drivers to attend.
“I just like to always focus on the performance side of things. I don’t like all the things around it, anyway. I know, of course, in some places they are part of it, but let’s say it’s not in my interest,” the Red Bull driver said. “I’m looking forward to trying to do the best I can, but I’m not looking forward to [the show].”
Las Vegas GP, Sunday 7pm, SS2
This is a grim tale, reported by the New York Times ($) about New Zealand tennis royalty. It was also republished in the NZ Herald, also behind a paywall.
This is the drop intro:
Four years ago, David Lewis received a phone call from the coroner’s office in Washington DC. His oldest daughter, Carolina, a former college tennis player, had been found dead in a hotel room. She was 23.
Lewis would later hear a convoluted story about a night of club-hopping, a man in a disguise, Carolina’s panicked phone calls and the rendezvous with a stranger that preceded her death. But at that moment, all he knew was that he had lost a daughter.
The Lewises are tennis royalty in their native New Zealand. David, 59, had been a touring pro, as had his brother, Mark. Another brother, Chris, played in the 1983 Wimbledon men’s singles final, losing to John McEnroe.
For a time, Carolina and her sister, Jade, carried on the family tradition. When they showed promise on the court as young teenagers, their parents moved the family to the United States so the girls could chase tennis stardom.
But soon it all went wrong. Jade entered a relationship with a football player who abused her; she still struggles with the psychological fallout. Carolina spent her years in college tennis hiding the trauma of a sexual assault she told friends about but never reported…
And this is the sign-off:
When David tries to comprehend what has happened, when he reverse-engineers the last few years to see what he could have done to protect his daughters, his mind drifts to the family’s move to America and the pursuit of tennis excellence that inspired it.
To the Lewises, it feels like their traumas are still happening to them and will happen to them forever. It is not a matter of getting to the other side. They doubt the other side exists. Tennis was everything for a time for the family.
Now it’s something else — a road they wish they had never taken.
NEXT WEEK
The Bounce will be, for the most part, taking advantage of a relatively fallow week in the sports scene to finish one side-hustle project and (gulp) start another. Look out on Wednesday evening, however, for an excerpt from my latest book, Modern New Zealand Cricket Greats: From Stephen Fleming to Kane Williamson, which will also come with the opportunity to win one of five copies up for grabs.
To the two who have already won copies - Anna Campbell and Dave McIntosh - your copies will be arriving in the post shortly! There will also be a special World Cup final edition of The BYC on Monday morning, so give your ears a treat and download that.
That is not gilding the lily either. New Zealand’s chase was gutsy and it was not until 41.5 overs that I put a line through them.
I had the pleasure of an evening at the Coliseum and while it is not a great ballpark it is magnificent to be able to sit in a seat behind home plate, drink margaritas, eat nachos and not break the bank.
I’m pretty content with the BCs CWC performance, I didn’t think we’d make the semis even though the draw gave us a chance to warm into the tournament with some soft early matches. The overall theme I’d say was that some outstanding batting masked some poor bowling. There were times when some bowling meltdowns threatened to morph into fully blown thrashings but only the SA turned out that way. Some focus areas for me:
1. Boult - failed to live up to leader of the pack status. Has never been great at bowling a dry line & length when there’s not much on offer.
2. Ferguson - enforcer status seriously undermined by age and slower wickets. Invariably leaked runs.
3. Latham - looked out of place in the modern, high paced game.
4. Sodhi - why take him if you have no confidence in his game? Potentially could have been useful in helping us defend big scores had we been minded to bat first more often.
Conways lack of runs post Game 1 could be talked about but honestly I think that just created more space for Ravindra, KW & Mitchell to thrive. We may need to look at a more dynamic style with our top 6 as we did get bogged down a little at times if you want to be critical - I think Will Young might be down the road for example, but I hope we’re smart about it, apart from Latham I wouldn’t do much with the top 6.
In the end I find it hard to be too disappointed being knocked out by India when they are demonstrably inferior, but well done BCs.
Thought the chase was structured magnificently. For me it was all over when Kane lost his wicket at the same time as Mitchell was cramping.