Looking for love in all the wrong places
A Valentine’s Day newsletter, including a dreadful day for NZC, the Super Bowl and “The Forgotten History of Head Injuries”
It was a bad news, terrible news, worse news morning for New Zealand Cricket.
Kyle Jamieson (pictured) has re-stressed the stress fracture in his back;
Matt Henry has mistimed his procreation;
The White Ferns suffered consecutive humiliations;
It’s desperately sad news for Kyle Jamieson.
Back in the day, I helped Shane Bond with his autobiography and there was an entire chapter dedicated to his back, which to this day is held together by a titanium rod and screws.
Fast bowling is a crazy science. The torque and stresses you put on your body are so unique it is impossible to come up with any strength and conditioning programme that is uniformly effective. Bond was brilliant and would walk into many neutrals best New Zealand test XI, but he played a sum total of 18 tests and just 120 internationals across all formats. He missed a phenomenal amount of cricket.
Across his first 16 tests, Jamieson has posted similar numbers to Bond, with a better average but inferior strike rate. For the Black Caps’ sake, you hope the similarities don’t extend to matches played.
Jamieson was an unlikely starter for the first test and even with Trent Boult’s absence, a three-pronged seam attack of Tim Southee, Neil Wagner and Henry meant New Zealand could perform a passable impression of a strong attack at Bay Oval.
That hope has been dashed with Henry’s absence for the birth of his and wife Holly’s first child.
The first cab off the rank many would have called for was Doug Bracewell, but he either didn’t cut the mustard or is nursing a groin niggle.
Either way, it wasn’t long ago fans were working out who would be the odd man out between Southee, Boult, Wagner, Henry and Jamieson. Now we’re wondering who will play out of Blair Tickner, Jacob Duffy and Scott Kuggeleijn. It wasn’t long ago when we pondered whether Colin de Grandhomme should be first-change or second; now we wonder if Daryl Mitchell should get any overs at all.
The Kuggeleijn selection defies logic except, possibly, for proximity. The ND speedster has taken four first-class wickets this season, took four in the Plunket Shield last season, didn’t play for New Zealand A in India and, by New Zealand seam bowling standards at least, has a fairly modest first-class bowling record.
This attack suddenly looks wafer thin and you can hear the Bring Back Boult chants getting louder and louder. It doesn’t make them righter and righter, though, just more convenient.
Moving to South Africa, and without sounding like a smartarse, I could see this White Ferns’ meltdown coming.
Not to the extent we’ve seen at the World T20, with two hopeless batting performances in what was anticipated as their two most difficult matches against Australia and South Africa, but I didn’t give them any more than a 50-50 chance of working their way out of the pool.
That 50-50 is now 5-95. Sri Lanka’s upset of South Africa in the opener still means there is a chance of three teams finishing on four points if New Zealand can beat Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. To have any chance of getting net run rate parity, however, they need Australia to hand out almighty thrashings to South Africa and Sri Lanka, and to similarly crush Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. At the moment the last part of that equation appears fanciful.
Why could I see this coming? Because I watched enough of the Super Smash to understand our women’s game is not in a good place.
Don’t take my word for it. This is Sophie Devine, who labelled the capitulation against South Africa as “embarrassing”, talking about the issue.
“If I’m being brutally honest, I’m not sure if [the Super Smash] is preparing us for international cricket and you’re seeing now the WBBL, the Hundred and now the WPL, they’re highly competitive tournaments and they’re preparing players.
“We’ve seen Australia, we’re seeing England [improve] and I’m scared to think what India’s going to be like with the opportunities they give themselves. We’ve done great things in New Zealand with our domestic cricket but I’m not sure it’s at the same standard as those other competitions.
“Everything’s going to be picked apart and rightly so when we get back to New Zealand.”
The amount of overs in the Super Smash tournament ‘wasted’ with extreme pace-off options is disappointing and the reason the word wasted is given the inverted-comma treatment is because that tactic remains dishearteningly effective.
There were entire overs where the ball shouldn’t have stayed in the park, yet the bowlers were getting away with conceding a few bunted singles to the leg side sweepers.
The game is headed in a more dynamic direction but the major associations either don’t have the personnel or the willingness to change the paradigm.
Adding to the sense of gloom around the camp is the fact that only two players, Amelia Kerr and Sophie Devine, were picked up in the inaugural WPL auction, with Suzie Bates and Lea Tahuhu high-profile omissions.
NZC needs to have a top-to-bottom rethink around the women’s game, particularly around junior coaching and an approach to the game that sees far less reliance on super-slow spin bowling and more emphasis on hitting through the offside.
As Devine said, there is a real danger New Zealand will fall further and further behind Australia, England and India.
The White Ferns aren’t the only team searching for souls. The Australian public and punditry has eaten its own after their crushing defeat in the first test against India at Nagpur.
Most hilarious has been the it-wouldn’t-have-happened-under-Justin Langer brigade. It’s quite common to lose to India in India. It’s an incredibly tough place to play cricket. Losing a series to them in Australian conditions, however? Justin Langer’s side managed that quite recently, against an injury ravaged India at that.
The (mostly) Super Bowl
Such a good Super Bowl, such a limp ending.
The Kansas City Chiefs, who beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 with a field goal in the final seconds, are a modern dynasty, having won two of the three Super Bowls they have appeared in over the past four years, and having been to the AFC Championship game five times in a row.
It’s a stunning achievement, having supplanted the New England Patriots, who beat them in the last of their eight consecutive trips to the AFC Championship game in 2018. Most pundits said that it was impossible for the Patriots to do what they did in this era of salary caps and parity, but the Chiefs have proved that a well-run and well-coached franchise can stay ahead of the pack.
It helps if you have a generational talent at quarterback, which the Chiefs do in Patrick Mahomes, who played through a sprained ankle to be the game’s dominant figure, just ahead of Philadelphia’s brilliant play caller Jalen Hurts. As was written in the lead-up, the days of the Fear of a Black Quarterback are well and truly over.
It was a match that held a tight grip on my attention until the final two minutes, when it petered out into something so anticlimactic that the whole experience felt hollowed out. American football, much like basketball, can become such an exercise in clock management that the final two minutes are the opposite of a crescendo. In basketball you send a player to the line, the most boring mode of scoring in the sport; in football you actively try not to score in a tied game until you can send out your field goal unit in the final seconds for a chip shot to win. You do this by taking a knee and running down the clock.
Fair play, if you’re a Kansas fan you care not a jot, but for a neutral who just wanted to see the sport at its best, all the air was let out of the balloon right at the part where you wanted it inflated to the point of bursting.
It’s for this reason that I disagree with the position of many American sportswriters who are calling this the greatest Super Bowl ever - but what would I know?
If we’re being totally honest, we don’t just watch the Super Bowl for the footy. In the US, they’re on high alert for the ads (not so many crypto ones this year by all accounts), but here it’s the halftime show.
There is a big hole in my pop-culture CV, it’s modern music, particularly R&B, so while the set for the halftime show dazzled, I was neutral about Rihanna’s performance. My daughter thought it was epic and Donald Trump thought it was an epic fail, so I’m going to go with the teenager on this one, rather than the juvenile.
Chris Stapleton’s version of the Star Spangled Banner was pretty damned good, too. Moved the Philadelphia coach Nick Sirianni to tears.
Oh, there was one other incident that stood out for me. Shortly after halftime, an Eagles defender drove Kansas’ spiky running back Isiah Pacheco into the turf. There was barely an arm in sight as he drove hard with his helmet into the middle of Pacheco’s chest, leaving the back gasping for air and taking time to make sure his ribs and sternum were all in place.
The commentator, former Carolina Panthers star tight end Greg Olsen: “That’s perfect tackle technique right there.”
Good grief.
But it does segue nicely to this…
Several people sent me this link, which surprised me only in that I didn’t realise the New Yorker had such a reach here.
There’s nothing especially new in this piece on the work of Stephen Casper, who has emerged as one of the most important voices in the complicated CTE-sports field. One of the reasons he has found a platform is because he is a historian, not a scientist, and therefore tells stories in a relatable, easily understood way.
Casper has created a timeline based on thousands of documents and studies and has discovered that doctors as far back as the 1870s were worried about the long-term effects of repeated head injuries. The crux of the piece is his response to the idea that before we “rethink our relationship with sports” we need more rigorous scientific inquiries including longitudinal studies that would take decades to complete.
Casper believes that the science was convincing enough long ago. “The scientific literature has been pointing basically in the same direction since the eighteen-nineties,” he [said]. “Every generation has been doing more or less the same kind of studies, and every generation has been finding more or less the same kinds of effects.” His work suggests that, even as scientific inquiry continues, we know enough to intervene now, and have known it for decades. It also raises important questions about how, and how much, old knowledge should matter to us in the present. If Casper is right, then how did we forget what’s long been known? And when does scientific knowledge, however incomplete, compel us to change?
In the same vein, this following sentence rings true and I have written about this phenomenon before. The “science is evolving” default position of large sporting organisations.
According to Casper and other critics, the main effect [CTE sceptics and industry-affiliated experts have had] in the controversy over concussions in sports has been to emphasise uncertainties and obfuscate what’s known.
But the paragraph that really caught my eye was the following, because it plays into something I have become increasingly concerned about in the narrative around rugby and neurodegenerative diseases.
In the twenties and thirties, [Dr Harrison] Martland aimed to reframe punch-drunk syndrome as a genuine illness. But naming the disease after its slang label may have been a misstep. “Its medicalization ran straight into a countervailing belief about losers—losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general,” Casper has written. “To medicalize such individuals was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes.” Stigmatisation made it easier for people to see sports-induced brain damage as a kind of personal failing.
You’re seeing this more and more with rugby and the promotion of alcohol abuse as a significant factor in brain health. While it’s true that there are compelling links between alcohol and dementia and while it is common sense to promote healthy lifestyles, this sudden concern is not only grossly unfair on the many former players struggling with neurodegenerative diseases who were not “drinkers”, but it’s problematic in other ways.
To plagiarise myself, World Rugby seems awfully keen on the beer barons’ money, and just as keen to shift the blame for CTE onto beer drinkers.
The Casper piece was also timely in that the Auckland University brain bank is about to make a splashy announcement about the first case of CTE in its possession. It is understood to belong to a New Zealander who lived and played rugby in the US.
Some great links from the wet weekend
“The dangerous conditions on the concourse outside the turnstiles were compounded by the police deploying teargas at disorderly groups of locals, as well as using pepper spray on supporters trying to gain entrance with valid tickets,” the report states. “It is remarkable that no one lost their life. All the stakeholders… agreed that this situation was a near-miss: a term used when an event almost turns into a mass fatality catastrophe.”
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The headline says it all in this rollicking read from The Athletic ($): “The FBI, a Rolling Stone and the ‘billionaire’ US fraudster who almost bought two football clubs.” It’s a story about California fraudster Henry Mauriss, who is now in prison but came perilously close to buying both Newcastle United and Sheffield United.
“I am surprised that someone has not put a website up ‘scammedbyhenrymauriss.com’,” said one former colleague, who wished not to be named to protect his reputation. “Because this is like a Netflix or American Greed story that you simply cannot turn off.”
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Good question, Sean Ingle: “So Mr Bach, will nothing ever be enough to ban Russia from the Olympics?”
So come on, Mr Bach, what are the IOC’s red lines? Would Russian boots marching in Kyiv be enough? Chemical weapons? The threat of going nuclear? It is not as if the IOC hasn’t taken unilateral action in the past. Germany, Italy and Japan had all its athletes barred after the world wars, while South Africa faced three decades in the wilderness over apartheid. Sometimes there is no other choice.
Me, I’m waiting with bated breath for the New Zealand Olympic Committee to show some courage… ha ha, jokes.
Thanks as ever Dylan. Fascinating, if perhaps unsurprising, to hear about Stephen Caspar's research. The issue of CTE just got personal for me, a close friend has been diagnosed with it. He's 62 and it's not looking good - the deterioration in his mental capacity is already quite marked. It's just heartbreaking for him and his family.
Injuries are a fact of life but Scott Kuggeleijn? Seriously? Very poor from NZC.
If not Kuggeleijn then who else? He's a reasonable white ball bowler isn't he? Maybe hoping he could translate that into pink ball? I don't hold out much hope for the test match going longer than 3 days though. Our batting may be ok but bowling is looking weaker and weaker.
The way the Women have lost is disappointing, maybe Wayne Smith needs to be brought out of retirement?