Monday Mash-up: Cam is NOT over it
Six Nations gets the Netflix treatment, Ko knocks on the door of the Hall of Fame, Blundell in doubt, and two words the good folk of Buffalo never wanted to hear again.
Quote of the day goes to Cam Roigard, who spoke for many when he said, per Stuff:
“You always want to play in those big games and missing out on [selection for the World Cup knockouts] was something I didn’t get over.”
Cam, it seems, is not the only one who hasn’t got over it.
If there’s one question I’ve heard more than any other around the barbecue this summer it concerns Roigard’s absence from the All Blacks bench at the pointy end of the World Cup after making such an impression in his first season.
Very few seem to buy into the argument that Fin Christie’s stronger pass was the decisive factor, or that his defence was stronger.
My take:
When they selected the side, Foster and Joe Schmidt probably envisaged replacing Aaron Smith in the final with a narrow lead. In that scenario, it wasn’t so much a sparkplug they were after but someone to make the right decisions, particularly on defence. In short, they probably trusted Christie’s game smarts more as Roigard had a tendency to go off script. As it turned out they found themselves with a narrow deficit… and man could they have used a sparkplug.
The story also had this nugget:
Roigard has already made a strong first impression on the All Blacks coach Scott Robertson by winning the fitness tests during their recent camp in Auckland.
Roigard equalled the Bronco record held by Beauden Barrett.
The Bronco is a 1.2km shuttle run, involving five sets of 20m, 40m and 60m and both Roigard and Barrett completed it in 4m 12s.
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It was inevitable that rugby would go down the Drive To Survive route given that every other sport that is struggling to reach new audiences has done the same. NZR+ dabbled with the concept with In Their Own Words, which was fine but it still felt like it was pushing familiar messages rather than truly being their own words.
Now we have Six Nations: Full Contact, which is set to premiere on Netflix this week, with the protagonists openly declaring it to be rugby’s DTS moment.
At the very least it will be curious to see how it plays out. To date, most of the all-access team-sport shows I’ve watched (aside from Welcome to Wrexham, which can be cute and occasionally uplifting, and Sunderland ’Til I Die, which is grimly interesting) have been disappointing, whether it’s Manchester City, Mumbai Indians, Arsenal, Dallas Cowboys, the Australian cricket team or the All Blacks. Given that Full Contact follows a tournament rather than a team, it has better chance of capturing the imagination, surely.
This quote from England’s Ellis Genge, who thinks rugby needs to modernise its thinking around how it promotes itself, was instructive.
“Rugby needs all the help it can get, to be blunt. Ultimately, you need this sort of spectacle to lift the game. We’re in a bit of a bubble. Rugby thinks it is the be-all and end-all but it’s not. It needs stars, it needs idols and it needs good press. Look at other sports: football, the NFL, the NBA, even cricket. People follow the individuals, not just the team. I don’t watch [the] NFL, I don’t know the teams, but I know the players. Are we going to get there? Who knows?”
Perhaps Full Contact is the next step in this evolution, but for now my only hope is that it isn’t mind-numbingly boring.
Lydia Ko is still just 26. That blows me away because it feels like I’ve been watching her for half a lifetime and yet the maths dictate that it is not possible.
With her win in this morning’s HGV Tournament of Champions, Ko is one of the youngest players to cross the 20-wins-on-tour threshold. She is one point away from the 27 needed for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.
It’s an amazing career by any standard, but it still feels under-appreciated. The fact she was so successful, so young made casual fans and pundits alike forget just how exceedingly difficult it is to win golf tournaments.
She said herself: “I won my first event last year, and it… went sideways really quick. I'll not get too cocky because I’m playing next week at a new course.”
Ko scuffed her way around the back nine at Lake Nona on her way to victory this morning, but the result never felt in doubt, though if you could have lived without watching baseball players in the ‘celebrity’ event that ran concurrently, you were not alone.
With the best will in the world, however, Ko wasn’t the biggest golf story of the weekend. Nor was Rory McIlroy winning in the desert.
That title would belong to Nick Dunlap, the first amateur to win on the PGA Tour since some bloke named Phil more than 30 years ago. Dunlap left a lot of money on the table, US$1.5 million, but don’t fret it, we think he’ll end up being okay.
Didn’t really want to broach this story about fighting at the football. It’s been an overwhelmingly positive season for the Wellington Phoenix, yet it has received little to no love in this newsletter because, brass tacks, I rarely watch the A-League and don’t read a lot of coverage of it. To then wade in for the first time this season because of a few muppets is, well, a bit shit really.
So instead I’ll just hand it over to the Yellow Fever, as passionate a fan club in New Zealand as there is and one that is suitably disgusted by the actions of a few.
It used to be said that the key to a good wicketkeeper was that you only noticed them when they weren’t there.
That’s not the case anymore because you can’t operate as a specialist keeper, you also need to be a test-quality batter.
In Tom Blundell, New Zealand found a way to move on seamlessly from BJ Watling, which tells you all you need to know about how good he is. With four test centuries and an average pushing 40 (it was 45+ until a lean home series against Sri Lanka last season and a disastrous tour of Bangladesh late last year), Blundell could have a case to make the side as a batter alone, but he is in doubt for the first test of the home summer as he battles to overcome a hamstring injury.
You always want your best players on the park, but there’s a tiny piece of me that hopes he’s ruled out because I’m genuinely intrigued as to who the next cab off the rank is.
If we take it as read that Max Chu and Mitch Hay are not there yet (they have one and no first-class centuries respectively), and that Devon Conway’s keeping is not good enough for red-ball cricket, that leaves, to my mind, Cam Fletcher, Dane Cleaver, Tim Seifert and Tom Latham.
Cleaver’s first-class batting numbers are better than Seifert or Fletcher’s and he’s genetically connected to Kane Williamson (who should be fit), but at 32 years old his ship might have sailed.
I’m not sure you’d want to give Latham the job for any length of time as combining opening with keeping is tough, but I suspect he might be the best option for a one-off test or even a two-test series. That would allow Gary Stead to open the door for Will Young, or possibly even the prolific Tom Bruce, to take a slot in the middle order.
If you know your NFL history, you’ll know why the words “wide right” cut so deep into Buffalo’s tortured past.
If you don’t, I’d urge you to watch ESPN 30 for 30’s excellent Four Falls of Buffalo, or more tangentially, crime caper Buffalo 66, directed by Vincent Gallo (who has been in the news for all the wrong reasons).
After starting the divisional round with three franchises who had yet to win a Super Bowl, we’re down to just the Detroit Lions, who will travel to the San Francisco 49ers next week, while Baltimore will host Kansas City.
UPCOMING
The next edition of The Bounce will be Friday, but midweek newsletters will return from next month. There will also be bonus editions for paying subscribers when the Black Caps’ test programme starts at Mt Maunganui on February 4.
Totally agree Matt. Promoting youth, especially when it’s banging down the door shouldn’t be so hard!
Maybe its in our blood that nz sports teams in general are conservative with their selections? Roigard in rugby, Nichols/Young/Ravindra in cricket, all examples of conservativism hindering progress? Sure there are more...