Oh wait, what's this? A year-ender!
My Top 10 favourite NZ sporting moments of 2023.
Last week I gave you a few of my favourite sports media moments of 2023, somehow managing to liberally crowbar myself, The Bounce and The BYC into several categories.
This is going to be a lot harder to do as I contemplate my Top 10 favourite NZ sporting memories of 2023. They are heavily weighted, but not exclusive to, big teams and big moments. As I like to do in these listicles, I relied mostly on my memory, which isn’t 100 percent reliable.
I have stuck to games and races, not boardroom shenanigans, no matter how enthralling the latter might be.
These are in a particular order - my order.
Some amazing stuff happened in 2023 but the most amazing thing to my eyes happened way back on February 28 when Neil Wagner, the man who has created his own mode of bowling, found the glove of James Anderson as he tried to tuck a single around the corner that would have brought the scores of this epic test match together.
It was an absurd test, with the Black Caps spending the first two days looking as atrocious as they did at Mt Maunganui in the first test. Then Tim Southee started hitting sixes, Ben Stokes enforced the follow on, Kane Williamson did his thing, the lower order nearly wrecked it, before a nerve-jangling England chase stopped one-run short of a tie as Wagner produced his Gesamtkunstwerk.
On Williamson’s innings, I wrote this:
When he came to the crease yesterday, Williamson was coming off the back of three failures in the series, the third coming from such a flimsy waft at nemesis James Anderson that you could be forgiven for asking if his days of authority were waning.
The thing about Williamson, though, is he lets other people worry about those sorts of things. It would never cross his mind to dig deep into the world of introspection. To borrow a line from my mate in the commentary box Daniel McHardy, if you could go inside the mind of Williamson and listen to his internal monologue, it would be the sound of a gentle Mt Maunganui breeze.
His answer to the problems posed by cricket is to bat. To bat in the way he knows; to bat in the way that he feels will best serve his team.
That’s it.
He might not be the most dynamic or classical batter New Zealand has produced, but he is the purest and that’s what this innings was - pure, unadulterated batsmanship.
Williamson’s knock was just one element in one of the greatest test matches ever played and my favourite sporting moment of the year.
The cricket was sprawling and epic, this match was densely concentrated and still epic.
A stonkingly good game of footy, after which The Bounce noted:
Every single player that took that field this morning was, in his own way, a magnificent bastard.
As a contest it managed to be both hyper-strategic and genre-busting. At various points both teams seemed to be able to bend the game and create the shapes they had the pieces for; at other times it felt like everyone and everything was little more than a random collection of atoms that were being controlled by fate and fate alone.
It was Sam Cane’s finest moment, his in-person response to the barbs he received during the test series against Ireland the year before, while Jordie Barrett had his moment of defensive magic. How ironic that a fortnight later both would be left fighting back tears (one more successfully than the other) after feeling they cost New Zealand a game.
Everything about this match felt “up for it”, even the officiating, which by rugby’s wildly fluctuating standards was accurate and mostly unobtrusive.
In the end, it was veteran Sam Whitelock who got his hands on the ball (above) after a thousand Irish attacking phases. Joy unconfined.
The Warriors smashed the Knights 40-12 in their first home playoff since 2008 and somehow what happened on the field was less memorable than what happened off it.
Under the new coaching regime of the likeable Andrew ‘Webby’ Webster, backed up by career years from veterans Shaun Johnson, Tohu Harris and Addin Fonua-Blake, the Warriors powered their way into the playoffs, showing a newfound ability to not only win the games they should, but to grind out the games they once would have faded in.
After years of mild interest (not helped by Covid), New Zealand fell for them in a big way - “Up the Wahs” and all that. So at the conclusion of this thumping playoff win, the Mt Smart/ Go Media crowd let them know exactly what they thought of them.
Spine-tingling stuff.
Whether by accident or design - probably the latter - the NRL in general and the Warriors in particular have tapped into the zeitgeist in a way that rugby either can’t or won’t. Fuelled by memes and TikToks, the Warriors are the hottest ticket in town.
Their lowest attendance for a home match was the 15,600 they drew to Napier’s McLean Park for their match against the Broncos. Their lowest crowd at Mt Smart was 18,895 for the win against the Bulldogs. More than 20,000 saw them play the Cowboys, Roosters, Dolphins, Rabbitohs, Sharks and Sea Eagles. More than 25,000 saw them beat the Dragons.
The Warriors have won the battle for Auckland and it’s not even close.