Deconstructing Harry
Notes from the Oval, The Week That Was and The Weekend That Will Be
Notes from the Basin #1
ENGLAND 315-3
New Zealand had a chance this morning. They got the side of the coin they wanted and the colour of pitch they wanted. They held their catches - one an absolute speccie by Michael Bracewell at third slip - and were rewarded with three early wickets. There was the pinkie-promise of more.
Despite burning through reviews faster than a dolt burns through lifelines in Who Wants to be a Millionaire, there were tangible signs that Matt Henry and Tim Southee had cracked England’s ultra-aggressive code.
They hadn’t.
This is not a story about New Zealand’s shortcomings, however. There will be time for that later in this test because this is not a blip, nor is it a post-World Test Championship hangover - this is where the Black Caps are now and it’s sobering.
This is a short story about Harry Brook.
That was his ninth test innings. He started with 12 against South Africa at The Oval, the only test he’s played on home turf. Since then he has scored 153, 87, 9, 108, 111, 89, 54 and this unbeaten 184.
He became the highest scoring Englishman at the Basin Reserve. Nobody in the in close to 150 years of test cricket has scored as many runs (807) as he in his first nine innings. Don Bradman had a paltry 476 - though he did score 1218 in his next nine!
Brook owns the numbers of a bloodless accumulator of runs, but that is the opposite of who he is.
The Yorkshireman, who celebrated his 24th birthday on Wednesday, is smashing numbers and records all over the place, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about him other than he’s enjoyed a successful start to his test career.
To watch him in the flesh gives you a much fuller picture, if only for the gunfire sound his bats make. He murders the ball, but he doesn’t offer as many chances to catch him as you might expect because he has three modes: defend solidly, hit the ball very high and long over the top, or club the ball very hard into the turf.
He doesn’t use the first mode as often as other and he picks his moments for the second mode having hit 20 sixes so far (for context, big-hitting Nathan Astle totalled 39 across 133 innings). But it’s the last mode that has been the most fascinating to watch. He rarely hits the ball along the turf in classical mode, but cracks it hard into the ground.
He’s not faultless by any stretch. There was one shot off Neil Wagner where he wrongly predicted a bouncer, gave himself room and when the ball was pitched up and followed him he just heaved it in the general direction of cow corner, getting just enough timber on it to clear a deep-ish mid on. When he does anticipate correctly, which is often, he slaps it hard and straight (as pictured above), which is the epitome of dismissive.
He had a laugh about that with Joe Root, who almost anonymously moved to his 29th test century, and that is the other thing: he’s clearly having a ball and that joy that has yet to be tempered by failure, rubs off on the crowd.
And he will fail. Maybe not in New Zealand, but tougher tests await in the Ashes and he has yet to play in India. Mitchell Starc and Ravi Ashwin might not be as accommodating as the likes of Neil Wagner and Michael Bracewell.
That is a puzzle for later.
When he reached 177 (a score that might have appealed as a team total when England was 21-3), his ‘live’ test average hit 100. It won’t stay there, but another stat of his hovering around 100, his strike rate, might. That will be a lot of fun watching.
NZ v England, 2nd test, Wellington, day 2-3, Sat-Sunday 11am, Spark Sport
THE WEEK THAT WAS
Here is a simple question with an implied answer: Are national governing rugby bodies fit for purpose, or does the sport’s administration need a radical overhaul?
The question is prompted in this part of the world by a multitude of factors, including the ongoing All Blacks coaching burlesque, the Silver Lake saga that brought New Zealand Rugby to the brink of civil war with its players, sponsorship misadventures and a series of curly high-performance culture questions.
Take a step back, however, and look at the bigger picture. That’s what the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew did:
You have an entire men’s and women’s setup to run, players and coaches and support staff, age-group sides, disability sides, training camps, pathways. Domestic competitions to organise: set the rules, appoint and train officials, adjudicate disciplinary cases.
You need to fund and administer an entire grassroots system with its thousands of amateur players. You need to negotiate broadcast contracts, find sponsors, sell tickets, print programmes, market and promote your game. You need to fight your country’s corner on international boards and the corridors of politics. You may have a stadium to manage. All this from the same office, in an increasingly hostile financial climate.
And remember: you don’t have a big weekly product to sell. Your one real meal ticket is the national team and if your players are any good they will almost certainly make more money playing somewhere else.
Liew had his eye trained on Wales, where the union has narrowly averted a players’ strike among widespread discontent about the way the professional game is being administered there.
It’s an excerpt applicable to NZR, particularly the final sentence.
The Silver Lake deal and the formation of CommCo can be seen as a response to the pressures Liew references. The scope of NZR’s powers and responsibilities are so broad it is no surprise they get many stakeholders, particularly in grassroots, offside.
No matter how you feel about the ‘tech-bro’ nature of Silver Lake and its propensity for seeking investment from opaque and even oily sources, if it sharpens NZR’s focus back to the health of the domestic game, it could have real benefits.
I’m not sure where to go with this but that’s okay, I’m not charged with leading my team at one of the biggest global sporting events that will ever come to these shores. The fact that Jitka Klimkova is not sure where to go with the Football Ferns is far more of a worry.
The Football Ferns coach told Stuff she will “review everything” following another World Cup lead-in loss, this time 0-1 to Argentina, but I’d suggest she is leaving it very late.
I have taken only a fleeting interest in the Football Ferns so can offer little more than platitudes, but I did feel a similar sensation to watching the All Whites - they could play every day for a week and not score a goal.
Kilmkova, at least, cannot be accused of not watching the scoreboard.
“We didn't win a game. We actually didn't score a goal,” she said.
Yeah, well, there is that.
They were lucky.
The six-stage 250km race, completed over a week, met rising waters near Macetown, an historic goldfields town on the Arrow River.
Stuff reported that “MetService had issued a heavy rain watch for Otago overnight Tuesday [and] snow was also forecast in the hills… Temperatures in Arrowtown on Wednesday reached as low as 5C, with heavy rain throughout the day.”
I’ve entered races at the lower end of the ultra spectrum, of which this clearly isn’t, but still, if I’m a competitor I would be asking serious questions of Southern Lakes Ultra as to who had my best interests at heart.
Arguably the most talented quarterback of all time, one whose immediate playing future is unclear, went to a darkness retreat, so of course ESPN followed him there.
Green Bay Packer Aaron Rodgers has a reputation for being the NFL’s resident kook, but a week in Sky Cave doesn’t sound that bad to me.
[Owner Scott] Berman said the room in which Rodgers spent his time is a partially underground, Hobbit-like structure with 300 square feet of space, devoid of light, with a queen bed, a bathroom and a meditation-like mat on the floor. It is fully powered, so at any point, the lights can be turned on from inside the room.
That light switch is a fairly big get-out-of-jail-free card but regardless of that, why exactly would you retreat into darkness voluntarily?
“If somebody’s sad in our culture, it’s like, ‘Let's fix you immediately.’ There’s not a real genuine exploration of, ‘Why are you sad?’” Berman said. “What happens if you just include the sadness and rest with the sadness, and be with it, without trying to change it? What happens from there? That is a unique aspect of darkness retreat.”
It’s approaching peak Formula One season. That is to say, the release of the latest series of Drive to Survive. If only F1 could inject some of the off-track drama into its races.
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
Unlikely to watch much other than cricket at the Basin, but there is a chance I’ll get in front of some r-r-r-rugby…
The opening weekend of Super Rugby Pacific has been overshadowed somewhat by The Ballad of Ian Foster, but there’s a couple of decent derbies to watch.
Crusaders v Chiefs, Christchurch, tonight 7.05pm, Sky Sport 1
Highlanders v Blues, Dunedin, tomorrow 7.05pm, Sky Sport 1
(The first week of Aupiki starts tomorrow with an afternoon doubleheader between Hurricanes Poua and Chiefs Manawa, followed by Matatu playing Blues Women, both SS1)
Given the dramas of the previous weeks, this Six Nations fixture might be worth a watch if only for potential car-crash value, with the home side really not that fussed about playing for the jersey right at the moment.
Wales v England, Cardiff, Sunday 5.45am, Sky Sport 2
Very interested to see how you summarise that cricket test Dylan!
I wonder if both rugby and football/soccer need a full overhaul as neither seem to be going in the right direction with men's and women's? As much as I want the ferns to do well in a home tournament I can only observe that the rankings don't seem right and we should be a lot lower than we are.
Go the Chiefs!!!