Nerves gather inside the Green Room
Celebrate a genuine rivalry, but not necessarily how we got here, PLUS: A bunch of review material.
Here we go, then, the blood match.
It’s Ireland against New Zealand.
It’s O’Mahoney v Retallick (oh, wait, one’s on the bench and one’s in Japan).
It’s Ioane v Sexton (oh, hang on…)
You get the picture though. It’s fire and brimstone; piss and vinegar; a clash of rugby cultures; a race to the top via the bottom.
As overplayed as the whole “hatred” angle might be given the absence of a couple of the major protagonists, for one night at least I’m buying it. I mean, it might be overplayed, but it doesn’t mean it’s not at least partly true.
The fact that Ireland has flipped the script on the All Blacks and started beating them on a regular basis has added abrasion to the occasion, but is that the only reason these teams have suddenly developed deep-seated antipathy towards each other?
Not according to this Herald deep-dive into the origins of the enmity ($). There’s some cracking details scattered throughout the piece, some of which are enlightening, and others grating. On Ireland’s first taste of victory against New Zealand in Chicago, it was noted:
There was another factor niggling the All Blacks after that 40-29 loss in Chicago. Ireland had enjoyed it too much — had let the celebrations linger a little long. Of course, they had enjoyed it, for the first time in 111 years of trying, they had beaten the All Blacks. It was a hugely emotional and significant moment, but unfortunately for Ireland, the All Blacks had developed a deep dislike of teams beating them and then over-celebrating.
Unfortunately, this not only rings true but is the sort of holier-than-thou crap that winds the rest of the world up. Who made the All Blacks the arbiters of post-match revelry? Did the mayor of Rugbytown pin badges on their jumpers while nobody was looking and appoint them celebration sheriffs?
Veteran Irish scribe Gerry Thornley tackled this phenomenon in the Irish Times:
Of course, they can be particularly sensitive in the land of the long white cloud to any critiques of the cherished All Blacks and its brand, and love a perceived sleight [sic] or two, whether real or imagined.
The test following Chicago, played in Dublin, was brutal, with Ireland believing the All Blacks had crossed several lines and the visitors believing the hosts had given as good as they got.
The way the respective sides viewed that test was reflected in the stories this week.
Thornley, in the Irish Times:
“Some of the All Blacks’ thuggery in their vengeful mission to Dublin a fortnight later would not be tolerated now and one senses it came at a cost to their image hereabout.”
Gregor Paul, in the NZ Herald:
Ireland appeared to be bitter about the nature of the game, seemingly of the view they had been passive bystanders at Aviva Stadium, and the following day, their team manager Mick Kearney would tell the media that 12 incidents were put in front of the citing commissioner, and 11 of them were committed by the All Blacks. And there it was – further proof in the eyes of the All Blacks that Ireland were all smiles and handshakes when they won, but sour and whiny when they lost.
After the 80-minute Dublin donnybrook in 2016, the rivalry has traversed two World Cups, two more end-of-year tours and a June series. Ireland have won nearly all the tests except the ones that really matter — the two RWC quarter-finals. There have been broken bones, red cards and hurt feelings, such as when Peter O’Mahony called Sam Cane a “shit Richie McCaw” as the men in green stunned the All Blacks at home, and when Ioane gave Sexton a send-off for the ages in Paris: “Don’t miss your flight tomorrow. Enjoy your retirement, you c***!”
(FWIW, I’ve always felt conflicted about the aftermath of the quarter-final. I have been aware for a number of years about the distaste towards Sexton and his on-field carry-on — and it’s not just the All Blacks that feel that way — and there was clearly lingering resentment that O’Mahony had disrespected their captain. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but even so it was a crass riposte. I can’t even type out the word c*** without my toes curling a bit. To send a 124-test veteran out with that ringing in his ears is the definition of taking the low road. On the other hand, we love rivalries that are not manufactured, and this one is certainly real.)
All told, the out-of-form Ioane’s presence in the starting XV has the potential to turn Aviva Stadium into a tinderbox for the Friday night kickoff. Thornley hopes so:
The All Blacks’ centre has since doubled down by posting a picture of the pair from last year’s quarter-final on social media with a joker card above Ioane’s head and a house emoji below the now-retired Sexton, to the backdrop of Zombie. Perhaps Ioane’s attitude reflects some of that old superiority complex, but it should add another frisson of atmosphere next Friday night.
It really should. Can’t wait.
Seconds out…
Ireland v NZ, Dublin, Saturday 9.10am, Sky
Elsewhere, the Joseph Sua’ali’i era of Wallabies rugby begins as he is poised to make a debut for the green and gold just months after playing for the Roosters in the NRL playoffs.
There is no shortage of pressure on the 21-year-old wunderkind, who is expected to transform the fortunes of the one-time superpower ahead of the Lions visit next year and, ultimately, the 2027 World Cup.
The cash-strapped union brought him in from the Sydney Roosters on a three-year-deal worth a reported A$5.35m.
It seems like a spectacular gamble. But if the 6ft 5in Suaalii is as good as many think, even that outlay will be a shrewd investment.
“I know union well and I think they got him cheap,” said Matt Parish, who coached Sua’ali’i at the 2022 Rugby League World Cup, earlier this year.
“I’ve got no doubt, no doubt whatsoever he'll be the greatest league convert to union.”
Elsewhere, rugby’s greatest headline magnet, Eddie Jones, have been featuring in large font again this week with the serialisation of Danny Care’s autobiography where he likened playing under Jones to living in a dystopian novel.
“It was like living in a dictatorship, under a despot who disappeared people,” Care wrote. “Remember what it felt like when someone was being bullied at school and you were just glad it wasn’t you? That was the vibe.”
From the SMH:
Did Rugby Australia know about the sort of behaviour alleged by Care before they signed Jones last year? There is no right answer, of course. If they did know and still signed Jones, it raises serious questions. But then so too would not having done any due diligence in the first place.
It should ne noted, Jones is coaching Japan now, yet he looms large over an ‘Ashes’ test. In Paris, where he is preparing his side to play France, he must be chuckling.
England v Australia, London, Sunday 4.10am, Sky
Scotland v South Africa, Edinburgh, Monday 5.10am, Sky
Wither now, Will Young?
The classy right-hander had his coming-of-age moment against India, at least six or seven later than many who saw him come through the ranks at CD expected, and a good five years after he scored back-to-back one-day tons for a New Zealand XI against an Australian attack that included Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc (he was so good on that tour that one of the Australian players is alleged to have texted a senior Black Cap at the time to ask where they had been hiding this guy).
Since debuting in 2020, his appearances across all three formats have been fitful, with ODIs (1244 runs at 44.4) appearing to be his best fit.
It’s test cricket where he wants to make his mark, however, but his ambitions for a consistent run might be thwarted again with Kane Williamson returning and no obvious spot in the middle order.
He was asked straight out how he’ll handle with that. There’s a big part of me that wished he’s restricted his long answer to his first three words and left it at that.
From Cricinfo:
You might not start the next Test series at home against England. How do you deal with the uncertainty of being the reserve batter?
I don’t know. You play domestic cricket or just cricket in general leading up to getting selected for the Black Caps, and you might pigeonhole yourself as a certain type of player or you bat a certain number. But I think it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. If you get an opportunity to play international cricket, that’s incredibly special.
And you’ll jump at the chance, whether you’re opening the batting or you’re in the middle order. So I think you’ve just got to be really authentic to yourself and try to play the way that you know that you can play best, and you bring those qualities and attributes to the team, then you’ll play your best cricket and you’ll have an impact on the game. So that’s what I keep telling myself — be true to myself and just try and make the most of every opportunity when it comes along.
The only way I can shoehorn Young into the playing XI for the first test against England in Christchurch is by playing three seamers, which is something New Zealand have been loath to do at Hagley Oval, and demoting Blundell. Then the team would look like this: Latham (c), Conway, Williamson, Ravindra, Young, Mitchell, Phillips, Blundell, Henry, Southee, O’Rourke.
Can’t see it, but it is an option. Meanwhile… a bilateral white-ball series. Yay!
Sri Lanka v NZ, 1st T20I, Dambulla, Sunday 2.30am, Sky
THE REVIEW SECTION
I have a lot of sports books on my nightstand waiting to be completed and, in one case at least, started1.
A book I finished in quick time was Neil Wagner’s All Out. The two big ‘reveals’ if you want to put it that way, are a) just how dark a place he went to, and by extension just how toxic an environment the Black Caps was, in his first year in the side, culminating in a tour to Sri Lanka (yes, that tour) where he imagined himself taking the most drastic step of all; and b) the exact circumstances of his brutal axing from the squad and the angst leading up to it.
We had him on the BYC yesterday to talk through it.
The material charting his journey through the South African system was also really interesting.
The book is ghosted by freelance journo James Borrowdale.
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Staying with cricket, the 2024 New Zealand Cricket Almanack landed with a thud recently.
I always love almanack day. I’m not a huge fan of the washed out look on the cover photo but it’s still a prime piece of real estate and this year it’s a shot of Rachin Ravindra raising his bat upon reaching his double century against South Africa, the first of what we hope will be 20-odd test centuries. No pressure.
Francis Payne and Ian Smith (not that one) do a great job and the first few pages, particularly the “happenings” are always a mine of information and a real treat. Every now and then they stop you in your tracks, like when I discovered that Kevin Burns had passed away in May this year.
Burns was a pivotal figure in the most highly strung cricket match I’d ever been part of. It was a Hawke Cup challenge and we, Taranaki, were the challengers to Southland’s crown. In typically grey and damp conditions in Invercargill, we were pretty happy to score 300-plus between the showers. Southland, whose number included a young pup named Jeff Wilson, were in trouble early and should have been in a huge hole when Burns padded up to a Glen Sulzberger full toss (he was a seamer back then, not a spinner) in front of middle. The ump gave it not out and several men of the Naki behaved quite badly as this and other decisions went the home-town way.
It all got pretty ugly but what I remember through the angst and chat, some of it quite vicious, was that Burns remained imperturbable, scoring a century in a day-and-a-half of pure grind that led Southland past our total. I had never seen anybody quite as proficient on the block: he blocked out the noise and, aside from that early misadventure, blocked out every delivery with a dead bat. It was terrifically boring, yet in its own way compelling.
But I digress. The Alamnack’s players of the year are Ravindra and Kane Williamson, while Zak Foulkes, Will O’Rourke and Gareth Severin are the promising players.
A couple of statistical nuggets made me realise we have passed one in India without knowing. Tim Southee finished last season tied with Ross Taylor (44) as being a member of the most test wins for New Zealand. After playing the first and second tests against India, he is now the record-holder with 46. Kane Williamson remains stuck in third of 43.
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A book that deserves more than the speed read I have offered it so far is Honey: My Story of Love, Loss and Victory.
It’s hard to wrestle with this paragraph without sounding patronising, but it’s super-important that people like Honey Hireme-Smiler get to tell their stories. For so long they’ve been ignored or remained off the shelves, but Ruby Tui’s Straight Up showed there is a market for well-told women’s sports stories and with Suzanne McFadden as her ghost, you know Hireme-Smiler’s will be well told.
The chapter on her wife Rochelle’s cancer diagnosis and treatment is particularly harrowing.
After four hours in theatre, they couldn’t get the stents into her liver. Once Rochelle recovered from that ordeal, her stomach sleeve was reversed — she’d only had it six days. In the third surgery, they managed to insert one metal stent with a plastic stent inside, and an external drain to unblock her liver. In her fourth procedure, they succeeded with two more metal stents.
Only this time, they accidentally nicked her pancreas. Rochelle was in a world of pain and struggling with nausea and other side effects. She has a high pain tolerance, but she suffered something wicked. It was so hard to watch her crying out in agony. The medication they gave her made her sleepy, but she needed sleep so her body could rest and heal. I sat there and watched her — reminded over and over of Mum.
This is one I will return to.
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The one I haven’t started, which I’m looking forward to immensely is Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic.
It’s a social history of the 1961 Ashes and the aftermath, and is co-authored by Harry Ricketts a poet, author and academic who has lived in New Zealand since 1981.
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I haven’t read Jimmy Anderson’s Finding the Edge yet, but I enjoyed this excerpt in The Times ($). It details the circumstances around his enforced retirement when he is called to a meeting at the Dakota Hotel in Manchester to be met by coach Brendon McCullum, director of cricket Rob Key and captain Ben Stokes.
They are all wearing sympathetic expressions on their faces when I reach them — half the kind you get when a relative has died and half the kind of someone who is worried you’re going to go for them. They sit there, nursing coffees. I read the room, follow suit and order the same. Their body language, even out of the dim lights, is a sickening concoction of that awful, patronising sympathy no one wants and palpable, pre-emptive self-defence.
My brain is doing the maths and my heart is sinking as I go to shake their hands. I feel like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, ushered into a room under the impression that I’m going to get made, only to be shot. You f***ers. They’re going to tell me something I don’t want to be told, aren’t they? Something I’ve been swerving, darting, shapeshifting, bowling through for my whole life.
It’s chased me for so long. I have half begun to feel it might never get me. I almost allowed myself to daydream that, somehow, I might be the only exception to the rule. But here it is — the career reaper — dressed as McCullum, Stokes and Key in the Dakota Hotel bar at midday in Manchester. They wouldn’t choose to do this in a public bar though, would they? Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe it is an appraisal.
I haven’t yet had time to lean on one eventuality or the other when the words come sharply, if reticently, out of McCullum’s mouth. They are organised and rehearsed, sure and slow: “We are looking to the future,” he says, as the sides of the room start to blur. “We don’t think you’re going to make it to Australia in 18 months’ time and we want to see who would be good for that series and have the time to work it out.” Oh, this isn’t even going to be a negotiation. It isn’t even a conversation, is it? I’m being told.
The “career reaper”. I like the imagery and, yeah, in one way or another, it gets us all. In sport, it just tends to be earlier and more brutal.
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I did it so you didn’t have to and I want you to remember this when you ask yourself, “When’s the last time that bloke from The Bounce did anything for me?”
Well, I went and watched one of those “fun yet wacky” NZR videos with “Japanese YouTube sensation, Fischer’s”.
Go on, I dare you…
Honestly, it’s pretty terrible, but I have to remind myself that it’s not pitched at people like me from the Mesolithic age. The was one hilarious part that had me in stitches, which was the realisation that the first two iconic snacks chosen by the New Zealand contingent for their wacky Japanese funsters to try were a dry Weet-Bix (made by Sanitarium) and Marmite (also made by Sanitarium).
So, yeah, it was actually an advertorial.
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NETFLIX HIT: The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox
Amazing baseball story well told in an oral-history kind of way. Has all the elements, including a classic narrative arc, relevant game and behind-the-scenes footage, conflict, pathos and most of the important voices.
NETFLIX MISS: Starting 5
You’d think it would be hard to follow five superstars in one of the top three most-watched and richest sports leagues in the world and come up with something this dull and self-serving.
The nadir of the series is what seems like half an episode dedicated to whether Jayson Tatum’s mum and son can get to a game in time.
LeBron James is in full LeBron Inc mode, Domantas Sabonis is nice and uninteresting, Tatum is obsessed with his son (which is cool, but makes for crap TV) and Anthony Edwards comes across as selfish and immature.
The only saving grace is Jimmy ‘Buckets’ Butler, who actually has some stuff to go through and comes across as a three-dimensional character.
The whole thing is a grind and the denouement feels more like a relief for the viewer than a crescendo. It’s another great example that there is more to filmmaking than following people around with cameras
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This was meant to be the bulk of a promised midweek newsletter but unfortunately I’ve been having a couple of issues with the old hammer-and-tack (back).
Unrelated, but I thought the BYC crew (Paul and yourself) were very restrained in not passing comment (or asking for an elaboration) when Wagner said Kuggeleijn was the worst person he has roomed with… 👀
Happy with that XI DC. If three RA seamers can’t get the job done, are we sure four can? What are W Alexander Young’s offbreaks like? 😜