MONDAY MASH-UP: Warriors cap a weekend of stunners and bummers
Three types of football to IndyCars to golf to basketball and boxing - so many sports and so many links.
Nope, did not see that coming at all.
The Bounce tried an inelegant reverse-curse to get the Warriors home against the Roosters a week ago, there were no such delusions sought when writing this on Friday: “The Warriors are in all likelihood at least a week away from jumping off this runaway losing train.”
Instead, I’ll let the lede on this Herald story tell you what happened.
Ten players missing, a five-game winless run and the three-time defending champions in the opposite corner.
But even with their monumental challenge only increasing after kickoff, the Warriors recorded one of their most famous recent wins.
That’s a good piece of match-reportage there. It’s informative, sharp and tells the whole story in less than 50 words - and I’ll even forgive the usually unforgivable “But even” start to the second par.
It was a famous win. You only had to listen to the commentary team led by Andrew Voss to understand how unexpected it was, with the excitable caller mentioning that if if some of the Warriors players were to walk into a room, only their close friends and loved ones would recognise them.
With such a long injury list, I’m not convinced the metaphoric corner has been turned, and neither is Chris Rattue ($), but it should ensure people keep pouring into Mt Smart for a bit longer.
Rattue wonders where the Warriors renewed energy the absent Shaun Johnson in terms of a contract extension.
This performance emphasised there is life without Shaun Johnson, and if the revered – currently injured – playmaker was considering another season, his chances of winning a 2025 contract have suddenly dipped.
Te Maire Martin stepped up, injured Luke Metcalf has already been marked for a big role and Nicoll-Klokstad brought energy to the halves that Johnson lacks.
Without Johnson, the Warriors’ match control in the halves was a very long way from perfect against Penrith [but] Johnson, who soon turns 34, is struggling physically and this victory against Penrith emphasised that it is time for the club to move on after this season.
On the other side of the coin, Penrith coach Ivan Cleary was not having a great day, judging by his 49-word press conference.
It included this valid question and disappointing response. I’ve got a lot of time for Cleary, but when you’re dealing with a subject as important as the arrest of one of your players, Taylan May, on domestic violence charges, you need to do better than “we’re here to play footy”.
Can you tell us, it’s all sort of pretty fresh, how you dealt with that [arrest] yesterday?
Just got on with life. We’re here to play footy and that’s what we did. We just didn’t play well enough today, so, y’know.
The mums and dads of Australia no doubt appreciate your concern, Ivan.
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This might be the second segment you read, but it’s the last one I wrote.
It wasn’t meant to be that way but in all honesty, my negativity towards Super Rugby can at times feel disproportionate and unfair. There is a persistent unrest in my own mind - a battle between two thoughts that compete against each other.
They are: the rugby is actually really good this year and sometimes even better than that; yet this remains a fatally flawed competition.
Take three cases in point.
The prestigious Gordon Hunter Memorial Trophy match was hosted by the top-of-the-table Blues who have emerged as title favourites under Stern Vern Cotter, yet Eden Park was maybe a little more than a third full.
Safely ensconced near the top of the table, the Hurricanes could afford to rest more than half their first-choice team against Moana Pasifika and their fans acknowledged coach Clark Laidlaw’s right to do so by acknowledging their own right to stay the hell away from the ground.
There will most likely be three teams - Rebels, Highlanders and Drua at this stage - in the Super Rugby playoffs with losing records. In a serious competition, it cannot be that with two rounds to go, half the teams in the playoff places do not have winning records (the fifth-placed Reds are 6-6).
Still, Super Rugby does have a capacity to surprise. The sport has a lot of arcane laws but the one that says you can’t bat the ball dead deliberately is not that complicated, yet the Crusaders managed to lose due to it.
Caps off a, um, Strange year.
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Northland Rugby chief executive Cameron Bell said his words “would not come close to evoking the mana that Sid [Going] holds within our province”.
I feared for the wellbeing of football reporters around the country on Sunday, after the Phoenix were rudely ushered out of A-League playoffs by Melbourne Victory who won 2-1 in extra time.
Stuff’s Andrew Voerman took a sip from his cup and found it half empty, referencing the Warriors’ troubles to disabuse anybody of the notion that the Phoenix will automatically be back at the pointy end of the season next year.
Once [manager Giancarlo Italiano] is back, he will have work to do with regard to upgrading his squad – and, as he hinted at on Saturday, a limited budget with which to operate.
It’s easy to see a clear path forward from this season to next season, but walking it will be a lot harder. Italiano only needs to talk to Andrew Webster, his counterpart at Warriors, to know how quickly it can all go wrong in round two.
That was an amazing crowd and it was nice to see that stadium filled with yellow that wasn’t an empty seat.
You couldn’t help but feel ripped off, however, as Oskar Zawada’s impossibly dramatic injury time equaliser was not the start of a finishing flourish, but in fact the final punch the Phoenix had to offer.
The Indianapolis 500 qualifying has to be one of the strangest, monotonous, yet mesmerising spectacles in all of sport. The cars literally go around and around an otherwise empty oval four times to register an average speed.
They are obviously terrifically fast, but without the context of other cars on the track and right-hand corners it can look a bit like a single slot-car set. You tend to just focus on the numbers, and that creates a bit of a head spin in itself.
Those numbers went the way of our very own Scott McLaughlin who was lightning.
Scott McLaughlin takes Indy 500 pole, Penske sweeps front row, said ESPN.
McLaughlin in the famed ‘Yellow Submarine’ entry led a Team Penske sweep of the front row of Indy 500 qualifying with a new track record Sunday around the speedway. McLaughlin's four-lap average of 234.220mph [376.94kph] broke the mark set by reigning IndyCar champion Alex Palou last year of 234.217.
Will Power qualified second and Josef Newgarden was third as Team Penske swept the front row for the first time since 1988 when it did so with Rick Mears, Al Unser Sr and Danny Sullivan.
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Meanwhile, wait for it… Max Verstappen won the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix. As often is the case, most of the drama happened off track.
His most eventful moment of the day happened before he even stepped in his car when a presenter with official Formula 1 broadcast partner Viaplay was marched off the grid in the middle of an interview.
Was the reporter actually a fugitive who had been finally caught after eluding police for years. No, he didn’t have the right accreditation. It’s a suitably boring explanation befitting of the race.
Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury put on a hell of a show, even if the Saudi surrounds struggled to generate the atmosphere the epic punch-up warranted.
Oleksandr Usyk’s legacy-defining win over Tyson Fury cements him as an all-time great, The Athletic ($)
The Ukrainian has elevated himself into the pantheon of all-time greats. All of his championship wins across the two divisions have been away from home, often on enemy territory and against the backdrop of adversity; against home-city favourites and ostensibly intimidating atmospheres. Fighting Fury, an expert in the psychological dark arts and throwing opponents off-kilter, in Saudi Arabia would have been one of Usyk’s less imposing expeditions.
‘Proud and happy’: Ukrainians embrace Oleksandr Usyk’s boxing victory, The Guardian
In Kharkiv, the north-eastern city that has come under intense bombardment in recent weeks, many people stayed up late to watch the fight. “It was really important to see Usyk winning this fight, and especially good to see a Crimean Ukrainian showing such a great example,” said Eugene Navolokin, 32.
One of the overused tropes in modern boxing coverage is the idea of lost lustre being returned to the heavyweight division. There have actually been a number of great fights in recent years - the Fury v Deontay Wilder trilogy, for example - and there is strength and depth in the division to match most eras in history.
Sure, you’d take the Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Ken Norton foursome from the mid-60s to mid-70s ahead of Fury, Usyk, Anthony Joshua and Wilder, the dominant fighters of the past decade, but it’s arguable as to whether they had a supporting cast as deep as one today, which includes Joseph Parker, Dillian Whyte, Joe Joyce, Zhilei Zhang, Agit Kabayel, Carlos Takam, Dereck Chisora, Luis Ortiz, Filip Hrgovic and Jared Anderson.
The division is really strong. It’s not the fighters that are the problem but the fact the sport has irrevocably changed. There are reasons the heavyweight crown will never weigh as heavily as it once did.
As much as I might dislike it, UFC has stolen the hearts and minds of younger fans of the martial sports. They’ve done it by doing something boxing has been notoriously poor at, which is running regular shows with strong cards (although a UFC following friend of mind suggests some of the recent events have been a bit watery).
The alphabet soup of boxing organisations confuses fans and poor judging (that is to say, the stench of corruption) alienates them.
The US is no longer the epicentre of the sport, which leads to…
Less coverage.
Boxing used to attract the creme de la creme of the sports writing and literary worlds. Giants like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer wrote about boxing, as did AJ Liebling.
Boxing even featured in The Iliad and The Aeneid. Say what you like about UFC, but Homer and Virgil never referenced one of their events.
Unlike the aforementioned, epic poetry has never been my thing, but despite being lukewarm on martial sports in general, I had a ball the few times I covered boxing. The characters in the sport come with creases and, yes, are often damaged. Despite, or perhaps because of, the corruption from above and the seediness that surrounds them, there is a genuineness to the athletes you don’t often get in other sports.
The Premier League season ended in somewhat anticlimactic circumstances. There are no Arsenal flags flapping anywhere near my house, but I wouldn’t have minded a different winner, or even just a little bit more suspense as the final 90 minutes wound down on the season. As it was, Phil Foden scored a worldie inside two minutes at the Etihad and it was all she wrote. Manchester City’s inevitability, as masterful as it is, threatens to become boring, if it isn’t already.
(This is of course not the case if you’re a City fan. This decade of dominance would instead feel something closer to life affirming.)
Liverpool has finished in City’s wake more times than they’d care to remember in the past nine seasons, but that didn’t stop the fans falling head over heels in love with their departing German manager Jurgen Klopp. He lived up to all of those cliches of being a man of the people; a part of the port city’s fabric; an honorary scouser. There was barely a dry eye in Anfield when he said farewell this morning.
To help him on his way The Athletic compiled a five-part series utilising six authors, getting to the heart of the “real” Klopp. It all adds up to something a little too close to a hagiography for my liking but as all the links are ($) subscriber only, I have telescoped them here to give you an idea of the man and the impact he had on the club.
‘The normal guy from the Black Forest’, by Oliver Kay
“Jurgen’s mother Elisabeth was from Glatten and she was very quiet,” [Ulrich Rath] says. “His father Norbert was from further north in the Rhineland Pfalz area, near Mainz. Norbert was very charismatic, very eloquent. Jurgen is like Norbert, but he has also something of his mother, I think.”
Norbert was a travelling salesman. He had the gift of the gab. He had also been, in the eyes of Klopp’s older sister, Isolde Reich, desperate for a son with whom to share his sporting passion.
Klopp has described how his father used to take him to the top of a mountain and ski down, leaving him with no choice but to follow. Ulrich and Ingo Rath describe how Norbert would take young Jurgen to the tennis court — “and Jurgen was never allowed to win,” Ulrich says, laughing. Standing on the touchline, watching his son play for SV Glatten’s junior teams, Norbert made his presence felt. “He was very strict,” Ulrich adds.
The powder keg, by Phil Buckingham
Referees might not mourn Klopp’s exit. Mark Clattenburg will not claim to speak for all his former refereeing colleagues but he gave a withering assessment of Klopp in his 2021 autobiography.
“Jurgen Klopp. Brilliant manager. Sour loser,” wrote Clattenburg, who first came across Klopp at Borussia Dortmund. “It annoyed me when managers could not be gracious in defeat. Klopp never took losing well and that followed him to the Premier League. He had a bit of Sir Alex Ferguson about him in that regard, and he would also try to intimidate you.
The one-man brand, by Caoimhe O’Neill and Andy Jones
Klopp is not only one of the most successful managers of the Premier League era, but also one of the most distinctive: the eyes, the smile, the fist-pumps, the beard – all are part of a strong personal brand that eclipses that of virtually any other manager currently working in English football, or possibly the world.
Other elite coaches may have distinctive selling points – from Carlo Ancelotti’s raised eyebrow to Pep Guardiola’s fashion choices – but none are as distinctive as Klopp’s, or as successfully monetised. It helps explain why his face can be seen everywhere in the city and on memorabilia including mugs, scarves, T-shirts and even Funko Pop figurines.
Visiting a Klopp mural is a rite of passage for any fan visiting Liverpool for the first time and companies have been swift to appreciate their commercial value. Erdinger, the German beer company that has partnered with Klopp since 2020, paid for a new mural to be curated on the side of Spanish Caravan, a small bar in the city centre, earlier this year.
Liverpool’s champion, by Simon Hughes
This from Mike Kearney, a blind Liverpool supporter who shot to fame when Liverpool scored a crucial goal in a Champions League match at Anfield and the cameras zoomed in on his cousin Stephen explaining the goal to him among the febrile crowd:
Kearney says it helps that Liverpool have had someone managing the club he believes in.
“Liverpool is a left-leaning city and Klopp has left-leaning values,” he says. “He’s never said something and done something completely different and that consistency is important to people in Liverpool.
“I thought we’d won the lottery when we got him, but never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d end up winning it all.”
The manager who made Liverpool believe again, by James Pearce
Pep Lijnders takes his time as he ponders how best to sum up the scale of Klopp’s contribution to Liverpool.
What a vantage point he’s had. The Dutchman was there to greet Klopp when he first arrived in 2015 and has been beside him almost every step of the way ever since on his coaching staff.
“In the past 30 to 40 years, not many coaches have changed a club like Jurgen,” Lijnders tells The Athletic. “Louis van Gaal at Ajax, Johan Cruyff at Barca, Pep Guardiola at Barca, Arrigo Sacchi at Milan. Then, for me, Jurgen here.
“Wherever we would have gone in the world, even if we had worn different colours, people would have recognised what they saw and said: ‘Ah, this is Liverpool Football Club’. As a coach, you cannot get a bigger compliment than that.”
First things first, the finish of the PGA Championships was pretty dramatic.
Xander Schauffele cast off the tag of the best current player to have never won a major, a disputed, unwanted title that could now rest with any number of players, including Viktor Hovland and Max Homa.
Schauffele held off a hard-charging Bryson DeChambeau, which will also keep the anti-LIVers happy. Of the 16 LIV players, DeChambeau and Dean Burmester (11th) were the only ones to finish in the top 40, but I’m not sure whether there is any clarity in the numbers just yet to say whether playing on the rebel tour hurts your chances in majors.
Ryan Fox played just well enough to make the cut and the one positive thing he can take from a tournament, where he was just one of four players who made the weekend and didn’t finish the right side of par, is that it represents six major cuts made in succession.
There were a few interesting questions and storylines, from whether Valhalla is a tough enough test for a major, Scott Scheffler’s arrest on the morning of the second round and Jon Rahm’s disingenuous PGA-LIV comments that appear to have rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.
All of them are covered off nicely in this golf.com roundtable.
When Rahm took the LIV deal, I think he did it with the expectation that it wouldn’t be long before the tours came to some kind of unifying agreement. It’s the only thing that makes sense, given all his pro PGA Tour rhetoric before leaving. But now that he’s hundreds of millions of dollars richer, I can see why his comments would leave a bad taste in the mouths of his PGA Tour peers. The point of all the contention between LIV and the PGA Tour is that you can’t have it both ways — not yet, anyway.
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Like Verstappen above, Nelly Korda winning is getting ridiculous and unlike the Dutch driver, it has little to nothing to do with the equipment she’s using.
The win [at the Mizuho Americas Open] extends an absurdly dominant run for Korda, who has now won six times in her last seven starts. Korda’s lone “blemish” during that stretch came last week at nearby Upper Montclair Country Club, in northern New Jersey, where she tied for seventh.
Two shocking upsets in the NBA today have given rise to a potential nightmare scenario for the US networks.
Anthony Edwards (pictured below) and the Minnesota Timberwolves knocked out Nikola Jokic and the defending champion Denver Nuggets by winning game seven to advance to the Western Conference finals. Earlier today, the Indiana Pacers went to Madison Square Gardens, shot the lights out and defeated the New York Knicks.
There is a chance that those teams could meet in the finals, which would pit the 27th most valuable franchise in the NBA (Pacers) against the 29th. Both teams are also in the lower half of the league when it comes to attracting TV audiences, although Edwards’ play, which has been compared to Michael Jordan, is quickly changing that.
Sports is a business, however, and there will be NBA execs crying into their pumpkin-spiced lattes that the Knicks flopped at home, and as many praying that the big-market Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks prevail in their respective conference finals. It’s all about ratings, baby.
This piece from The Ringer is an interesting take on why many experts and pundits find the Celtics so tedious. I’m not sure if I agree, but these two paragraphs are worth highlighting for the writing alone:
This Celtics run has been a protracted state of awaiting—for fans, for detractors, for the team itself. Call it joyless, call it the easiest path to the NBA Finals in four decades, and Celtics fans might rush in to defend, but in an obligatory manner befitting an older sibling defending their kid brother more than an outright denial. They have the birthright to cast aspersions; you don’t. What we can all agree on is that it feels like only a matter of time before the Celtics reach their destiny as the Eastern representative in the Finals. There is a distinct void at the heart of that sentiment: Whatever it is, it isn’t sports, really. It’s clock-watching.
And…
Growth may not be linear, but charting the success of the Celtics in the [Jayson] Tatum era draws as straight a line as is possible in the NBA. That has always been the promise of these Celtics teams: In talent, in construction, in leadership, the Celtics are as straightforward as it gets. And this particular group of players — should Kristaps Porzingis soon return healthy from his calf injury — is among the most talented in the franchise’s storied history. That the team regularly goes through stretches of aimless play feels illogical. Cataclysmically embarrassing blown leads feel akin to AI hallucinations. Their past eight years have been a kaleidoscope that has refracted success in every possible way other than the way that is undeniable. There is still an unresolved tension at play.
It’s a real skill to make tedium sound so interesting.
I thought this was a terrific piece of writing on Fury being a plonker.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/350283170/tyson-furys-classless-judge-claim-insult-dazzling-oleksandr-usyk
Re Max Verstappen, Man City dominance:
I have a male dominated senior English class full of boys who'd rather be driving tractors or playing sport than listening to their embattled English teacher.
Today, however, we (I) struck gold by debating whether it's better to watch an era of dominance and marvel at the excellence of it or have a more unpredictable competition.
Hands were nearly thrown with references to Crusaders, All Blacks, Storm, Queensland, Verstappen, GS Warriors, Tom Brady, Floyd Mayweather, Usain Bolt etc.
After nearly 45minutes of pointing, shouting, ferocious Googling and fact-checking, the majority settled that they enjoy an era of dominance because the pay off when they eventually fall is all the more sweet.
Not sure I agree entirely but it was a fun period 2 that's for sure.