It's Feedback Friday!
There's some mild rebukes for The Bounce before The Week That Was examines a divorce and The Weekend That Will Be is already exhausted
Had a day-one subscriber round at Chez Cleaver for coffee yesterday. He remarked how nice it was that my comments section was a place for civil discourse rather than ad hominem attacks and polemics.
While I agree with his sentiment, I don’t want anybody to be under the impression you can’t challenge my positions, particularly when it comes from a place of curiosity or caring.
Indeed, I often get correspondence directly to email that will point out flaws in my reasoning or, occasionally, flat out mistakes.
Like this, from Madeleine Chapman following my Monday wrap of the weekend’s World Cup action, when I stated: “Have to confess to already being tired of hearing and reading about how this is more than just a rugby tournament, that it’s a significant moment in sports history ya-de-ya-de-ya…”
Madeleine responded: “Have to disagree with [this] line… It is a significant moment in women’s sports history! [I] reckon people are allowed a weekend to acknowledge that before carrying on with the tournament.”
When I look at the sentence I wrote in isolation, it looks a little mean spirited, and although I’m pretty sure we’re also on the same team in that we want elite sport covered like elite sport, she also mentioned that the people she attended the opening games with had little interest in rugby so it shows the benefit of selling it as more than a sporting event.
If I had my time again, perhaps I’d reshape that intro to read more along the lines of: “There was some cracking rugby played over the opening weekend of the World Cup and that’s what I’ll focus on while leaving the examination of the tournament as a cultural and social phenomenon to others.”
Perhaps…
There was another mild rebuke in the comments section of Wednesday’s newsletter ($), and I was waiting for this one.
I wrote:
There’s a name missing in this analysis - Kane Williamson, the greatest name in New Zealand batting history. He sat this one out and while I think the 200-plus total and Williamson’s absence is a classic case of correlation not causation, his strike rate of 102 for the tournament is a continuation of a year where too few balls have pinged off the middle of the Gray-Nicolls bat.
In fairness, he batted as well as he needed to in successive small chases and New Zealand today showed they can still score heavily when their No3 is struggling for timing, as a rusty Martin Guptill scuffled his way to 34 off 27.
Andy replied (abridged and edited for clarity):
I’m going to be a fair bit tougher on captain Kane and challenge your “correlation not causation” comment. In the mitigating circumstances column you note that Kane had done all he needed to do in the two preceding careful chases. We were chasing sub-par totals… not exactly pressure. This last game [against Bangladesh] we gave others the opportunity to get settled (denied to them with him at 3) and look at what happened. Just because he has been our best player doesn’t mean he still is and I can see this team suffering for it a la the All Blacks of 2019 which failed to see the deterioration in key personnel.
There is no question that Williamson is struggling to recapture his best form following a long-term elbow injury and there’s also no doubt that T20 cricket is the hardest arena to try to find it. I’d even go a step further and say it’s surprising how long it has taken for such an intelligent batter to work out that the slide to third man is not the bail-out option for him that it once was.
But… the guy is a bona fide genius with a very good T20I record and is only 11 months and seven matches removed from an outstanding 85 off 48 balls in a World Cup final.
I do agree there is cause for concern with his form and, more pertinently, his approach at the crease, especially when batting first, but it’s not time to push the button on the ejector seat. And while the 2019 All Blacks analogy works on one level, I’d argue that deteriorating key personnel wasn’t as big a factor as the newer wave of players not being good enough.
In short, I don’t reject your comments Andy, but I just haven’t got to where you’re at with Williamson - yet. Others have, though.
I asked for feedback on whether the benefits of having a New Zealand franchise in the A-League and ANBL were outweighing the negatives. I’m beginning to have my doubts, particularly with basketball where the sport is so popular here the country can sustain a viable and even even flourishing semi-professional domestic league.
Rupert Crump, Max and Matt Steele all responded thoughtfully and noted that, particularly in football’s case, it was good to have a professional pathway in New Zealand, which in turn opened up access to other professional leagues. A net positive, they all agreed.
Interestingly, all had big caveats around academies and football’s money tree.
Rupert: “Football has become even more expensive to play and the academies here have to be amongst the few in the world where the majority pay to be in one. That isn’t solely the Nix fault. The ‘game’ overall hasn't reacted well or strategically to the elements of the Nix below the first team. There are too many issues to name.”
Matt: “Bigger worry for local football is the fake amateurism that blights the game. So much money gets pumped into player payments that could be used in developing young footballers.”
Max: “I am worried about the academy style football coming into youth age grade, even from juniors. You now have some clubs asking seven year olds to train twice a week and play in graded competition. This specialisation… from such a young age is going to crush many sports long term.”
Finally, one from last week’s “the science is evolving” column. I received some lovely feedback on this, particularly from a couple of people within the science community. While my piece was commentary on the language used when discussing the subject rather than the science itself, it did provoke this response from an unnamed subscriber (again, abridged for clarity).
Hmm a big dollop of false equivalence unfortunately. Although the science shows there’s a clear link between professional rugby and brain diseases in later life, I don’t think the research does clearly demonstrate what is the cause? Is it the way matches are played or training?
Whereas the science around biological males playing contact sport against women it is absolutely clear that you can’t balance safety and fairness with “inclusion”. Ross Tucker is really good reading/ podcast on this if you want to actually understand.
So there’s a clear “answer” to the trans issue whereas for rugby in general, what is the solution? I accept doing nothing isn’t the answer, but I’m not sure what the answer actually is without fundamental change to the game itself.
I’m not sure how to respond concisely to this, and it is a well-considered note on a valid debating point, so I was inclined to just let it hang there. Well, almost. As stated previously, I agree with rugby’s stance on the transgender issue and do not believe you can balance fairness with inclusion in this case. To suggest, however, that the transgender science is “absolutely clear” because Ross Tucker says it is, whereas it’s not for the links and causes of CTE (which was first written about 1928 in a paper about dementia pugilistica) despite scientists with as much if not more cachet than Tucker outlining that the only thing CTE sufferers all have in common is exposure to repetitive head impacts, is essentially the same sort of cherry picking I was (rightly) accused of.
Thanks again everybody for taking the time to write. I appreciate it all.
THE WEEK THAT WAS
It was the week of the divorce. Danny Hay, All Whites coach and something less than saviour, officially separated from New Zealand Football, an organisation famous for looking for love in all the cheap places.
Jason Pine ($) had the best wrap, tying up the good and bad - bad that too few seemed willing to even contemplate - of Hay’s reign. His most interesting line was this:
Within the All Whites, as with any team at any level, there are different cliques, often based on experience. When there’s a 15-year age spread in a squad, that’s bound to happen, but some of the younger players weren’t huge fans of the old-school approach often used in an attempt to motivate them, believing there were better, more modern ways of going about things.
I’ve had those sentiments put more bluntly to me from a source, who said that Chris Wood was definitely NOT speaking for all the team when he launched a passionate defence of Hay in the aftermath of the home and away defeats to Australia.
I have no idea if Hay was a good coach, an unlucky coach or got what he deserved. What I do know is that he was tasked with getting the All Whites to the World Cup and failed. He might have been a brilliant identifier of young talent but his team couldn’t score goals against teams from outside the Oceania conference.
I’ve not yet read a convincing argument as to why the much-maligned NZF should have rubber-stamped an extension without assessing its options.
It certainly didn’t come from Kevin Fallon, who has never been wrong about anything in his life, ever, and whose addition to the debate seems to be that in his day they didn’t muck around with “high performance”. It was surprising just how far down this story you had to go before it is mentioned that his son Rory was Hay’s assistant.
Elsewhere in Stuff, Phillip Rollo is not too bothered that Hay is gone; he’s already named his successor.
Sky TV won the rights to World Rugby events from 2023 to 2029, including the men’s and women’s world cups and the struggling world sevens series. It caps a remarkable buying spree for the pay-TV operator, renegotiating or securing the rights to NZ Rugby, the NRL and English Premier League among other things, as well as slapping their name, for reasons that have always escaped me, on the Cake Tin.
Is it the best thing for the consumer? We’ll have to wait and see. Spark Sport has always struggled, even within certain media, to shake the tag of being a hindrance to the New Zealand sporting public, even though their emergence broke a virtual monopoly and forced Sky to lower prices and expedite a transition to digital.
I remain unconvinced that Spark being spent out of the market will be a good thing, because Sky has to recoup the extraordinary sums it has spent on rights somehow and with recent offloading of its world-class outside broadcast unit and Rugby Pass, they have got little left to sell.
That potentially just leaves you and me to pay for it.
People often cite the competitive pricing of Netflix in discussions when they express frustrations about the cost of Sky and Spark Sport, but the main reason the entertainment giant has remained affordable is competition from streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu and Apple TV.
For the most part, viable competition is good.
I enjoyed this story. It’s utterly self-serving and gratuitous, but I was sucked in the moment the author writes:
I called the Hilton Hotel in Westminster, pretending to be David Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. I spoke with their private events manager for 45 minutes, ordering a stupendous party banquet for the Conservatives’ imminent victory: hundreds of bottles of Krug, trays of shepherds’ pie, feathers to fall from the ceiling at the moment the vote was called in their favour. All of these requests were sent to the hotel from my school email one afternoon. The following morning, I was pulled out of my geography lesson, and told that the hotel had called my school requesting a £10,000 deposit. I was very nearly expelled.
Trays of shepherds’ pie seem like a delightful food match for Krug!
Yes, it’s a sports story, but one unlike any you’ll read this year. It’s the “amazing true(ish) story of the ‘Honduran Maradona’.”
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
All the sport that I will be attempting, but probably not quite managing, to watch this weekend as I head to Waihi Beach for a twice-postponed 50th.
After an unseemly pause, the World Cup resumes. If you have to pick one game each day, it has to be La Crunch between tournament favourites England and the team many pick to be their closest rivals, France. It’s a no-brainer on Sunday, with New Zealand and Wales meeting at a user-friendly time.
RWC tomorrow, Whangarei, Spark Sport: Scotland v Australia, 3pm; USA v Japan, 5.30pm; England v France, 8pm.
RWC Sunday, Waitakere, Spark Sport: Italy v Canada, 12.45pm; NZ v Wales, 3.15pm; Fiji v South Africa, 5.45pm.
This cricket Tri-Series has been low-key, unseasonable, quite cute and at times bewildering. Enjoying those afternoon starts, too.
NZ v Pakistan, Christchurch, today 3pm, Spark Sport
The Rugby League World Cup has snuck up on me a little, but I am not just here for the Kiwis, I’m excited for their prospects. That pack, with the likes of James Fisher-Harris, Moses Leota, Nelson Asofa-Solomona, Isaiah Papali’i and Jesse Bromwich is scary.
The previews from me might have been scarce to non-existent, (but here’s one from Stuff to read), but I’m buckling up for the ride now, even if some of the times are unfriendly.
England v Samoa, Newcastle, Sunday 2.30am, Spark Sport
NZ v Lebanon, Warrington, Monday 7.30am, Spark Sport
There is a part of me that feels guilty about my complete disengagement from the NPC this year, a competition I find more relatable than Super Rugby. Some things just have to be cut. To be honest, semifinals that involve Wellington, Auckland and Canterbury fail to ignite much passion in me, but what the hell, I’ll try to catch a bit of the Friday nighter.
Wellington v Auckland, Wellington, tonight, 7.05pm, Sky Sport 1
It’s baseball playoff season and at the risk of alienating at least three subscribers I don’t really care what happens as long as it is not a Yankees-Dodgers World Series. So come on down Ron Burgundy’s favourite team, the San Diego Padres. They’re tied 1-1 in the best-of-five series.
Padres v Dodgers, Gm 3 NLDS, San Diego, tomorrow 1.37pm, ESPN
Williamson's struggles pain me. I still remember in just his 3rd T20 in 2012, demoted to number 7 because we needed over 200, and by the time he came to the crease we needed 21 off 9 balls, and he proceeded to score 20 from 5. Yes, it was only against Zimbabwe (this must be one of the few matches against Zimbabwe that sticks in my mind!), but he forced the hand of everyone who said he was too slow and shouldn't play T20. He made it look almost effortless - but nothing looks effortless for him now.
In that regard, Conway is the new Williamson and can almost do no wrong in any form of the game. Having Williamson in the T20 line-up when Conway is fulfilling that anchor -> acceleration role isn't viable when Williamson can't accelerate, especially in Australia where big totals will be required to win. Even at spin-friendly Sydney, Williamson's adeptness at playing spin shouldn't be enough to justify him a spot when you've got the likes of Phillips to take on the spinners.
What a cool platform this is, qudos Dylan for bringing us into your fold! Really enjoyed your riposte and I will have a good think about it! I am a fan of proactive succession and seeing the writing on the wall, that is probably my modus operandi. It is worth remembering that Tendulkar went through a dull patch about two thirds of the way through his career and revisited his scoring options and overall approach. As you touch on Dylan re the dob to third man it seems to have taken way too long for Kane to readapt. I’m not necessarily saying put him out to pasture but I would like us to look at where in the order he bats and what his role is, pretending he is the Kane of five years ago is causing problems, especially in T20.