Footy's back, but a wee way south of Super
Fullbacks star in Dunedin, a horror half of football, the lights go out in Beijing and more Mickelson mockery.
One thing about the cricket finishing so early on Saturday was that it didn’t feel quite as weird watching rugby in the afternoon.
It still didn’t feel right, mind, just not quite as disorienting.
Discounting the wild finish to the Brumbies-Force match where the West Australians took a deserved late lead before abjectly surrendering it with a headless final two minutes, the best match was the Crusaders win over the Hurricanes in Dunedin.
There were some outstanding individual performances as the match moved along haphazardly.
The Crusaders were lucky to open up such a convincing lead and yet the final 42-32 score flattered the Hurricanes. That statement doesn’t really make sense but that’s how I felt about the match as a whole.
There was some literature before the season started that the Crusaders were vulnerable but they look no more ready to relinquish their title than they have ever been in the Scott Robertson era.
The match was mostly notable for the respective performances of the fullbacks.
The All Blacks looked shaky and thin in certain areas on the end-of-year tour, especially midfield, but they have enviable depth at No15.
Will Jordan’s speed and lines of attack carved up the Hurricanes, while Jordie Barrett’s physicality and skillset meant he was the Hurricanes primary (only?) threat.
Leicester Fainga’anuku was something else too. The Crusaders left wing picked up a hat-trick so is an easy mark for some player love, but his work while not in possession would have excited his coaches.
In the other New Zealand derby, the Chiefs were well worth their 26-16 win over the Highlanders, with better-than-solid shifts from All Blacks Brodie Retallick and Sam Cane in an otherwise patchy match.
The moment of the round belonged to Pita Gus Sowakula, with the big No8 going all NFL wide-receiver style in hurdling Aaron Smith for a try (pictured above).
Queenstown is a beautiful place. You can’t beat the panoramas to The Remarkables and Lake Wakatipu, but geez it was a stretch watching fully professional rugby on a club ground.
Perhaps New Zealand Rugby were thinking the same thing, because they are in talks to have the teams pack up and move back to their home bases earlier than planned.
I largely ignored the story of South Africa joining the Six Nations that broke in the Daily Mail last week because if I lost $5 every time it was mooted I’d be heavily in debt now.
Still, it continues to hang around like a bad smell, so here’s ESPN to handily summarise where we’re at and what the competing forces are.
While you couldn’t blame South Africa for wanting out of Sanzaar after the shemozzle of the last few years and New Zealand’s unilateral attempt to take over Super Rugby, it would be a sad day for the global game, and ultimately damaging for the sport itself, if the Boks joined the northern championship.
Spare several thoughts for Meikayla Moore. In one of the most improbable scenarios witnessed by these eyes, the Football Ferns defender scored a perfect hat-trick - right foot, header, left foot - in their match against the USA.
One problem: they were all netted into her own goal.
This can’t have happened ever before, surely?
This is where coaches have to earn their money because, honestly, what words of encouragement could you possibly offer after being compelled to substitute your central defender before halftime?
One of the most common recurring nightmares is turning up to school and realising you haven’t put pants on. A hat-trick of own goals would be the sporting version of that.
Please let her have a redemptive performance against the Czech Republic on Thursday.
Have to confess to largely switching off the Winter Olympics days before the lights went out in Beijing, but Nico Porteous made it an event to remember for the New Zealand snow sports fraternity by winning a treacherously difficult freeski halfpipe final.
His achievement was covered off nicely here, as were his plans to take an OE and then try his hand behind the camera as a creative outlet.
Porteous said one of filming’s great appeals was “the effort you have to put into getting that one 10-second clip. It's sort of like a mini-version of a comp buildup. You are out there, building a jump, or you're scoping a spot to get a 10-second clip in the same way you're out there training for an extended period of time to reach your goal in a competition.
“Filming is an awesome opportunity within skiing and something I'd really like to tap into.”
With New Zealand sending just 15 athletes, winning two golds and a silver was some achievement. The medal tally doubling the country’s total since New Zealand first competed at Oslo in 1952.
Along with Zoi Sadowski-Synnott’s success - the pair has five of New Zealand’s six medals - you can drop a pin on Wanaka becoming a winter destination in the post-pandemic world. Wrote the Guardian in the wake of Porteous’ triumph.
Remarkably, only 12 of the 91 nations competing here have managed to win more golds than two athletes from a small lakeside town. “We both come from a town of 10,000 people and skiing and snowboarding is our passion,” Porteous said.
You can’t pay for that sort of PR.
Also in the Guardian, Sean Ingle sums up the total experience under the headline: “A Winter Olympics that was farcical, disturbing and often exceptional.” Sounds fair.
On a slightly lighter note, I’d never really considered just how extreme the drawback of competing as a male in subzero temperatures could be. Feel free to click the link, but the headline says it all really: “Finnish cross-country skier suffers frozen penis in 50km race”. Picture not supplied.
Last week I highlighted Phil Mickelson’s descent into infamy with one of the most venal sports quotes of all time.
“They’re scary motherf*****s to get involved with,” he said. “We know they killed [Post journalist Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
His fellow pros have largely abandoned him in the wake of the interview, with the top 10-ranked players committing to the PGA and European tours. There have been screeds written on it since, but there was one particularly pointed piece by Washington Post journalist Jennifer Rubin. They operate a hard paywall so I won’t link to it, but here’s a couple of the highlights.
This sort of breathtaking greed and unabashed disdain for others’ suffering is hardly unique. Mickelson’s offense was, as the expression goes, saying the quiet part out loud. Shamelessness is widespread these days.
Rubin goes on to list a number of other groups of people who embrace moral bankruptcy to enrich their own needs, such as Republicans who hate Trump and Trumpism yet enable him to serve their political ends.
Rubin signs off by saying.
Mickelson’s Faustian bargain with the Saudis brought on a furious reaction because his reasoning was patently amoral and because the stakes for him (new golf tournaments for already rich and successful golfers) are pathetically small. But really, there are plenty of Phil Mickelsons out there. They simply aren’t as honest about their willingness to attain selfish ends at the expense of others.
Elsewhere, Eamon Lynch of USA Today’s Golfweek, took out the driver and teed Mickelson up.
An old adage… holds that if you wait by the riverbank long enough, the bodies of your enemies will eventually float by. That’s as good a metaphor as any for how some golf industry executives must have felt in the wake of recent comments by Phil Mickelson that incinerated his reputation, alienated most every constituency in the game, exposed him to disciplinary action, and otherwise cast him in a light so unflatteringly amoral that even Greg Norman might hesitate to be seen in his company.
THIS WEEK
Apologies for the late and somewhat truncated newsletter, and further apologies in advance for any erratic timings over the following days. At this moment, I’m not sure whether Omicron has entered the house but it is certainly knocking loudly at the door.
The plan is still to post at least once midweek, followed by a combined The Week That Was and the Weekend That Will Be/ Notes from the Oval on Friday. These will be free to all subscribers but the weekend editions of Notes from The Oval, analysing the second New Zealand-South Africa test at Hagley Oval, will be for paying subscribers only.
Look out later this week also for a book giveaway.