Monday Mash-up: A damp squib and an almost Super start

Stead’s record v Australia in the spotlight ahead of critical test series.

Yep, that sums it up. Getty Images

It was hard not to feel mild embarrassment for the Black Caps specifically and New Zealand Cricket in general as Australia bolted home for the second time in a weekend.

What a desolate scene that was yesterday, with a few scattered thousands watching on as a barely recognisable New Zealand were pumped around a damp rugby ground.

“The Aussies are coming, the Aussies are coming,” roared the hype train. “Get your tickets one and all. Roll-up, roll-up and… watch some dross!”

Wow, New Zealand were bad. 

I started making some detailed notes on Friday to carry over into Sunday but they already read redundantly. The following will suffice:

Fielding - wretched. This was Pakistan-in-the-bad-old-days levels of incompetence. I counted at least eight drops or bungles, with usual suspects Mark Chapman and Ish Sodhi featuring prominently. Add to that some questionable boundary riding, including Glenn Phillips on the final ball of game one and you have a tale of woe. The catching in the crowd was of a consistently higher standard than on the field.

Bowling - let down badly by the above, especially the luckless Adam Milne, but still fairly ordinary. It’s hard to be hyper-critical when defending kiddie-sized boundaries, yet you can’t ignore how much better Australia was at it.

Batting - In games two and three, gross. Not just poor skill execution but blinkered thinking that fell right into the heart of the proverb about insanity being defined by doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.

Perhaps the two most deflating things about the series were New Zealand’s incredible ability to save their worst for Australia, and that three months out from the World T20 we didn’t learn much good about anybody other than the fact that Lockie Ferguson isn’t done with yet and Ben Sears has a bit about him.

A couple of perfunctory notes worth mentioning:

• As poor as New Zealand was, it would be remiss not to mention the fact they were without Kane Williamson and Daryl Mitchell, their two smartest right-handers, for the series. Devon Conway and Rachin Ravindra, their two most talented southpaws, were missing from the batting crease at Eden Park. The others should have done better, but that’s a big chunk of talent gone. Add to that Tim Southee, the T20I record-holder for wickets, who missed the Eden Park matches (though he didn’t cover himself in glory in Wellington), and James Neesham who is boofing it around for Rangpur, a city famous for colourful rugs, and you have a severely depleted side. 

• If you look at the series numbers you might be under the impression Phillips was a beacon in the dark. I’d strongly argue otherwise and would even suggest his performance yesterday could be used as Exhibit A in the case of traditional batting stats being worthless in T20s. 

• Once New Zealand were left with the daunting prospect of 126 from 10 overs, essentially two per ball to keep it close, their biggest hope was for Finn Allen to get on a roll. With half the overs at their disposal gone, Allen was still at the crease and yet the game was over. At that point he had faced just eight balls as Tim Seifert and Phillips fluffed their lines. At one point Phillips faced down five dot balls in a row, only restarting his innings by snicking Nathan Ellis, his chief tormentor, through a vacant slip for four. 

• What was the point of playing Josh Clarkson in the series if you were barely going to use him? Mitchell Santner clearly had no faith in him as a bowler, using him for just one over in a series where his bowlers were getting serious tap. Clarkson has made a name for himself as being a guy who can hit sixes from ball one in domestic cricket, yet when that skill was most required yesterday, he sat languishing behind the likes of Seifert and Mark Chapman. Admittedly he struggled in game two, but he was not alone (has there ever been a less effective cameo at No3 than Santner’s 7 off 13 balls?). Three games and we learnt nothing and he learnt nothing - other than the fact that T20Is are a lot harder than the Super Smash.

• It wasn’t even the batting failures that stung as much as the method. Continually trying to muscle their way to boundary in front of the wicket instead of taking the even shorter and easier option behind the stumps suggests tunnel vision. It was amusing listening to Craig McMillan (or maybe it was Mark Richardson, I was only half listening by then), almost begging the Black Caps to use Australia’s pace and bounce to their advantage by at least trying to ramp or scoop. 

• Cricket can no longer be passed off as a credible sport on rugby grounds. The bats are too good and the players are too strong. Australia were miles better in every department, but I don’t think you can point to a single innings across the three games and say, “that was quality cricket.” A few players had moments of effective slogging, particularly Mitchell Marsh, but as a rule it was ugly fare.

More reading: Andrew Voerman at Stuff ponders the selection ramifications for the World T20 starting June in the US and Caribbean.

So we move on to the tests now and despite the crossover of a few players and the fact the flags they play under remain the same, what has happened in the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy should have little bearing on what happens at the Basin Reserve and Hagley Oval over the next fortnight. 

There will be a more detailed preview of this critical series on Wednesday, including, hopefully, a rosier long-range forecast for Wellington, but there is one number worth highlighting:

0

That’s the amount of times a Gary Stead-coached New Zealand side has defeated Australia in a game lasting more than 20 overs per side. New Zealand has met Australia 19 times in the Stead era and beaten them four times, all in T20s, with three of them in New Zealand.

Few would expect parity, but it’s alright to ask for a semblance of competition, isn’t it?

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I enjoyed most of what I watched in the first weekend of Super Rugby, bearing in mind I tend to restrict myself to New Zealand derbies at this stage of the season.

The Chiefs and Crusaders put together an appropriately frenetic start in Hamilton, with the home side holding on 33-29. At one stage it looked like it was going to be a romp, but when Damian McKenzie left the field, so did a lot of their attacking spark. He’s a monster talent at this level.

Chiefs halfback Xavier Roe scored what should have been a candidate for try of the season off the back of a long-range McKenzie break, but it might not have ended up being try of the weekend after Sam Gilbert finished a similarly flowing move in Dunedin, that included a Globetrotter pass from Folau Fakatava. The Highlanders eased to a 35-21 win over Moana Pasifika, though sterner tests await when they meet the Blues in Melbourne, a city represented by the tenuous Rebels, who went down 3-30 to the Brumbies.

Magic Round? We’ll see.

As with all things rugby these days, you can’t have fun without at least one serving of admin angst and this week it came in the form of the smart mouthguards mandated by World Rugby (explained best here).

Players and coaches were left confused during the Chiefs-Crusaders with players being forced from the field despite them not knowing why.

“Honestly, I think it’s a step too far, for a player when you’re getting dragged [from the game] and you’re looking around going, ‘What actually happened?’,” said [Crusaders captain Scott] Barrett.

I’m a proponent of increased player welfare, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I remain sceptical of mouthguard technology, especially when you’re drawing lines and saying x amount of force is too high, but x-1 is okay. At least one mouthguard/tech company is going to do very well out of it, and World Rugby looks like it is doing something about a hot-button topic, yet nothing is being done about the single-most critical issue: volume of rugby.

Scott Barrett was out there playing rugby on February 23. He will still be out there playing rugby on November 23. Bluetooth that.

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High drama in the Six Nations… kind of.

Paolo Garbisi and the agony of a near miss. Getty Images

The tournament itself was basically over the moment Ireland marched into Marseille on the opening night and defeated the hosts (those that laud the tournament often neglect to mention what a foregone conclusion it often becomes within the first week or two), but Italy had a chance to do the unthinkable and also beat France in France, until an unsteady tee, the shot clock and a wobbly kick intervened. They had to settle for a 13-13 draw instead.

In Edinburgh, Scotland retained the Calcutta Cup with a 30-21 victory, despite falling 0-10 behind to England.

Sir Clive Woodward has four questions he’d like to ask coach Steve Borthwick, three of which are below. Couldn’t agree more with the first:

1. Why are England’s players celebrating meaningless penalties?

2. How many England players would make a World XV right now?

3. Why are you persisting with this narrative of development?

This final one is interesting. It has crept more and more into professional sport because, frankly, coaches always want more time. The promise of improvement, or development, is enticing for their paymasters. Woodward is having none of it.

Borthwick has to – and I mean has to – look at the language he uses with regard to his team. 

After the Scotland game, he said: “You see a team trying to develop and add layers to its game but they made errors.” International rugby is not about development. It is about winning. The more you put the notion of development in the players’ minds, the more comfortable and careless they become. 

If a player is constantly being told they and the team are developing, it takes away any sense of jeopardy or urgency. It is another lesson from the Jones era that has not been learned. 

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Getty Images

The result of this morning’s League Cup final left a bittersweet taste. Liverpool beat Chelsea 1-0, the goal coming in the 118th minute as another penalty shootout between the sides loomed. It was the first goal between the two sides in their last three finals together, which also included the 2022 League and FA Cup finals.

The result got manager Jurgen Klopp’s farewell party off to a rollicking start, especially considering the following stars were unavailable through injury: Mohammad Salah, Diogo Jota, Darwin Nunez, Thiago Alcantara, Dominik Szoboszlai, Curtis Jones, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Joel Matip and Allison Becker.

As The Athletic noted ($):

This was a Klopp side rendered almost unrecognisable because there were so many youngsters filling in, particularly as substitutes.

Whoever was going to be on the losing side would wonder why they lost it, but Pochettino could call on players for whom the club have paid millions and they fluffed their lines.

Or, as Barney Ronay wrote in The Guardian of Chelsea:

And by the midway point of the second half this billion-pound miscellany, the non-team of all the talents, was competing against a team of youth-team alumni, eager and talented fill-ins. By the time Virgil van Dijk scored the winning goal with a penalty shootout looming the people flopping on top of him were Bobby Clark, James McConnell and Jayden Danns, energetic kids out there having the time of their lives. By contrast the player Van Dijk had to outjump to score was Mykhailo Mudryk, basically a YouTube player signed as a punt, another human part thrown into this random football generator.

It’s not the trophy big teams like Liverpool want the most, but fans around the world would have been delighted and none more so than this guy. Paul McKinley was a Liverpool nut, a bundle of energy as a principal and a hell of a nice guy whose generosity will always be remembered in my home.

He was a timely reminder to me that the real heroes of our education sector are the ones who work against the odds in places that are too often forgotten, dedicating themselves not to trinkets, but to improving the lives of every kid that walks through their gates.

He will be missed.