Perfect time for NZ to give a toss
The Black Caps need a mood-changer, PLUS: The Week That Was and the Weekend That Will Be
Last summer I got chatting to a fellow who had played in a few of these ICC tournaments and the conversation shifted to punditry. He casually mentioned that the most tedious and pointless cricket chat invariably centred around the toss.
The idea that teams just turn up in the middle and make a decision based on a tuft of grass here, a crack there or puff of wind in the air was ridiculous, he said. It was a data-driven decision and the data point was simple: what gives us the best chance of winning.
Teams play poorly for all sorts of reasons. Winning the toss might give you an advantage but the idea that it can make you execute your skills better is fanciful, and yet cricket is the one sport where poor performance is often sheeted back to a decision at a coin flip.
I’ve been thinking a bit about that chinwag over the past couple of days as first New Zealand and then Sri Lanka won tosses, inserted the opposition and watched them score 357. In reply, they fell, respectively, 190 and, gulp, 302 runs short.
In those circumstances it is hard not to talk about the decision made at the top of the match. Tom Latham has certainly found himself answering questions about it.
Let’s ignore the Sri Lanka catastrophe. They have wracked up 105-20 in their past two ODIs against India, which is failure on such a grand scale that it defies any attempt to rationalise it.
New Zealand’s capitulation at the hands of South Africa is more interesting because it has serious semifinal implications.
That was not a good performance. In pure perception terms it was made to look worse by the fact that they played to South Africa’s strengths by inserting them, although that conveniently ignores that Latham made the decision based on what management believes is New Zealand’s strengths.
If you don’t bowl well enough, catch well enough or bat well enough against a good team, the order in which you do it is not the crucial element BUT… holy moly, that Pune strip looked like a bat-first wicket all day, every day.
As tedious as toss chat might be, it’s hard not to think their thinking has become far too rigid around it.
So they now move on to Bengaluru with an injury ravaged squad and creeping doubts as to the best way for them to play.
One of the reasons why doubt is creeping in is because one of their key strengths - wickets with the new ball - just hasn’t materialised.
In seven matches Trent Boult, Matt Henry and Lockie Ferguson, who have world-class strike rates of 29.1, 30.3 and 32.9 (to put that in perspective, Sir Richard Hadlee’s ODI strike rate was 39.1 and Dan Vettori’s was 46.5), have taken seven wickets in the powerplay and just one against teams in the top four.
Obviously the conditions are different from New Zealand, but they would have been counting on more joy with the new ball but they simply haven’t found enough outside edges or front pads.
With injury clouds hovering over Ferguson and Henry in particular, it might be up to the old firm of Boult and Southee to conjure up something because no matter how good you think you are at chasing, hunting down 320+ totals is a low-percentage game.
There’s also the continuing saga of Kane Williamson’s thumb. His calmness as captaincy might be as valuable as his batting right now.
The way the format works, beating Pakistan is not necessarily a must-win, but it certainly feels like it because it puts destiny back in the Black Caps’ hands. A loss brings net run-rate permutations into play and means that not only will Sri Lanka need to be beaten in the final match (and possibly well beaten), but that other results need to go their way.
It’s a far cry from where the team was sitting a week ago.
The Black Caps highlight a bountiful weekend of big games including tonight’s which would have been earmarked pre-tournament as one to miss. Instead, New Zealand could really use a favour from the Netherlands.
Afghanistan v Netherlands, Lucknow, tonight 9.30pm, SS1
NZ v Pakistan, Bengaluru, tomorrow 6pm, SS1
Australia v England, Ahmedabad, tomorrow 9.30pm, SS3
India v SA, Kolkata, Sunday 9.30pm, SS1
THE WEEK THAT WAS
The news that Addin Fonua-Blake wanted out of the Warriors with immediate effect hit hard.
You can talk about Shaun Johnson’s re-emergence as a superstar alongside the work of coach Andrew Webster as being the major reason for the Warriors dramatic upturn, but I don’t think Johnson looks as good as he does without AFB’s hulking presence, his metre-eating and his fine skills.
Yes, good props can be created as opposed to the great halves who have to be born with some intrinsic gifts. Give a good coach a basic 1.85m/110kg mould, and they can turn it into a replacement-level front-rower in short order, but Fonua-Blake is not just your replacement-level prop.
So this afternoon was a good afternoon.
Per Stuff:
Addin Fonua-Blake will stay with the Warriors for the 2024 season.
The prop asked for an immediate release from his contract for compassionate reasons on Thursday.
However, Stuff understands an agreement was reached on Friday that he would continue playing for the Warriors next season and his future at the club beyond that discussed at a later date.
Fonua-Blake was signed with the Warriors until the end of the 2026 season and it shocked the club when he informed them that he wanted a release to enable him to return to living in Australia, reportedly so that he could be closer to his parents…
By Fonua-Blake remaining with the Warriors for 2024, it enables Andrew McFadden, the club’s general manager of recruitment, retention and pathways, to find a suitable replacement for 2025, if Fonua-Blake does leave at the end of next season.
This is the singular disadvantage the Warriors have and why this time of year is always problematic.
Players go home. They get around family. They get around old friends. They visit their old haunts and think, “This is the life I know, this is the life I want to return to.” It’s hard to resent them for it, but in this case I’m glad they’ve nutted out a compromise.
Said AFB in a statement: “My only motivation for this move is for family reasons, but I really want all Warriors fans to know that I am fully committed to getting into the 2024 season. I can’t wait to get back to training with my teammates with the aim to go even further in the upcoming season.”
Over the course of the year, let’s hope someone like James Fisher-Harris feels equally strongly about returning home.
If you’re squeamish look away now because you’re going to read the journalist equivalent of roadkill as the Australian Financial Review’s Mark di Stefano goes after Rugby Australia boss Hamish McLennan and the sport’s old-boys-network culture in a series of columns that should come with a box of popcorn.
In a story dated October 23 and headlined, “Hamish McLennan and a rugby party in Paris” (all the links are $), Di Stefano wrote:
Questions have also been raised about where exactly McLennan and his sidekick, CEO Phil Waugh, actually are. Coach troll Eddie Jones seems increasingly out of control, with stories about his possible Japan exit throwing salt in Wallaby wounds every day.
Well, we’ve solved it. McLennan and Waugh are still in Paris! The duo were the invités d’honneur of Tony and Josephine Sukkar, the husband and wife team behind Buildcorp, Australian rugby’s mainstay sponsor. The Sukkars threw a lux “cocktail party” on Sunday night for Australia’s rugby refugees, alongside Gillian Bird, Australia’s ambassador to France. It was organised before the Wallabies’ embarrassing tournament showing.
The McLennan-Waugh reception was held at The Abbey House, a five-star flat in Paris’ St Germain-des-Pres, smack bang in the middle of the 6th arrondissement.
Di Stefano reported that Nick Farr-Jones, part of McLennan’s University club clique, was also in attendance, signing off with the piquant line: “While the game immolates, the instigators are still in Paris.”
Turns out the reporter was just getting warmed up. In his next piece (October 26) titled “Hamish McLennan can’t stop, won’t stop partying in Paris”, he writes:
McLennan has entered his Marie Antoinette phase.
On Wednesday night, McLennan co-hosted a luxurious party for rugby elites alongside ambassador Bird at Australia’s Paris embassy. The invitation, written in French, called the party a celebration of Rugby Australia’s “Golden Decade: La décennie dorée de sport Australien”.
We’re told the title wasn’t referring to the past 10 dreadful years for the Wallabies, rather, the next decade, which will feature a British Lions tour and World Cup in Australia. What’s better than getting pantsed by rivals at Twickenham or the Parc des Princes? Doing it in front of home fans!
The 200-person guest list for the event included chair of World Rugby Bill Beaumont and CEO Alan Gilpin, and too many cauliflower-eared, coat-tailed officials to name all here…
We’re told caterers flew in Australian seafood for the event, pairing with imported Penfolds and Leeuwin Estate wines.
Putting all this great Aussie produce together was the star chef himself, [Guillamme] Brahimi, top-billed on the invite for putting together an “amuse-bouches” selection…
Who is even paying for all this? We know the answer.
During his failed stint running Channel Ten for Lachlan Murdoch, McLennan picked up the broadcast rights to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics on the cheap. Media circles still talk about McLennan’s corporate hospitality in the Russian snow.
But McLennan pushing ahead with holding opulent parties in Paris, long after the Wallabies embarrassment and with the game’s long-term finances still in limbo, shows the man has lost all judgement.
Turns out it wasn’t AFR’s piece de resistance on the Rugby Australia shemozzle. That came in the October 30 Di Stefano piece titled: “The self-pity party of Hamish McLennan.”
“Don’t channel your anger to Eddie, channel it to the system that needs changing,” McLennan went on. “We’ve been saying Australian rugby needs to centralise and now is the time to do it.”
There is certainly someone who should shoulder the responsibility for the World Cup fiasco, the Jones mess, the stop-start-stop effort to lure private equity into rugby. But for McLennan, he’s intent on blaming “the system”.
“We haven’t won the Bledisloe in 22 years. What more evidence do you need? The system is broken.”
Was it the system that installed an ageing egomaniacal coach, who ditched the country’s most decorated players and trashed veteran Michael Hooper? Was it the system that hosted opulent parties in Paris catered by a celebrity chef seemingly at the expense of grassroots rugby? Hamish, is the system in the room with us now?
McLennan’s lame effort to point the finger at a boogeyman “system” is a well-trodden move to remove individuals from disaster. Chief among them, himself…
This is the system he understands. It’s the system that promotes these private school ne’er-do-wells, always failing upward, where the chief motivation is to outlast, regardless of merit or performance.
Oof!
Hey, but at least McLennan’s wife has his back.
“Don’t listen to the haters. It’s so wrong,” Lucinda McLennan posted on Instagram, according to the Daily Mail.
“What’s so funny. Knowledge is power. You have none,” she said to rugby supporters who clapped back at her.
As you might have already guessed, Di Stefano is not the type to let this pass.
A wife who’ll take on the critics in public Instagram posts is real #couplegoals. But what does this soap opera tell us about McLennan, a man who still hasn’t accepted proper accountability for the mess rugby finds itself in.
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe she was simply freelancing, filling a few minutes on the tarmac before take-off. Or maybe, the McLennans still don’t get it.
On the subject of polarising figures, we now shift to the US.
Bobby Knight, the longtime college basketball coach, died this week.
As Dan Wetzel wrote on Yahoo Sports:
He was brilliant. He was a bully. He coached some of the most perfectly disciplined basketball ever played, and then acted undisciplined in his own life.
He was an American original and a cultural touchstone with oversized impact, in ways good and, yes, sometimes less so.
As coach of the storied Indiana Hoosiers, Knight’s outburst has earned him a place in folklore. He was also the subject of one of the greatest sports profiles ever written. The art of sports profile writing is practically dead in New Zealand because they take time and aren’t necessarily click-generators - and when they are put together they tend to be a long interview supplemented by selected people saying nice things about the subject. A great profile should be, like the subject, a complex insight into the human condition.
This, from the late, great Frank Deford, is startling and at times really uncomfortable, like the following passage:
It’s practice time, and two of Knight's acquaintances are sitting at the scorer’s table. One is a black man, Joby Wright, who starred on Knight’s first Hoosier team in 1971-72. Six years after his athletic eligibility ran out, Wright returned to Indiana to get his degree; now he’s going for a master’s in counselling and guidance. All along, Knight helped Wright and encouraged him with his academics, as he has many of his players. In Knight’s nine years, only one Hoosier among those who have played out their eligibility has failed sooner or later to get a degree.
The other person at the table is a white woman, Maryalyce Jeremiah, the Indiana women’s basketball coach. Now it’s an accepted fact of life - disputed, perhaps, only by Nancy Knight, Bobby’s wife - that Knight is a misogynist, but Jeremiah he at least abides. She’s a coach, after all.
Knight advances on Wright, and says, “Hey, Joby. Do me a favour.”
“Sure, Coach.”
“I want you to get my car and go downtown.” Wright nods, taken in. Knight slams the trap: “And I want you to go to a pet shop and buy me a collar and a leash to put on that dog out there.” And he points to one of his players, a kid Wright has been working with.
Okay, it’s a harmless enough dig, and Wright laughs, easily. But Knight won't quit: “Because if you don’t start to shape him up, I’ll have to get some white guys working on him. You guys don’t show any leadership, you don’t show any incentive since you started getting too much welfare.”
Wright smiles again, though uneasily. Now, understand, Knight isn’t anti-black. Just anti-tact. That’s the point. One of his former black stars once recalled a halftime against Michigan when Knight singled out two of his white regulars as gutless, and then went over as they cowered and slapped their cheeks, snarling, “Maybe this’ll put some colour in your faces.” It isn't racial prejudice. Still, still....
Knight walks down to the other end of the scorer’s table. “Hey, Maryalyce.”
Brightly: “Yes, Bobby?”
“You know what a dab is?”
“A what?”
“A dab - D-A-B.”
“No, what’s that?”
“It’s a dumb-assed broad,” he says, smirking.
“I don’t know any of those,” she replies - a pretty quick comeback.
But he won’t leave it alone. The edge, again: “Yeah, you know one more than you think you do.”
And he moves on. The white woman shrugs. It’s just Bobby. The black man shrugs. It’s just Bobby. But why is it just Bobby? Why does he do this to himself? He’s smart enough to know that, in this instance, he isn’t hurting his two friends nearly so much as he hurts himself, cumulatively, by casting this kind of bread upon the waters, day after day. Why? Why, Bobby, why?
***
Dwight Howard is another polarising basketball figure.
He’s recently been accused of sexual assault.
Everything wrong with the reaction to Howard’s situation can be found in the media’s response. The conversations online aren’t around justice or equality or victims of sexual assault. Instead, we’ve only gotten memes, jokes and roasts about Howard’s sexuality… Whether Howard is gay or bisexual or experimenting is meaningless and should have no bearing on his career opportunities and legacy. The grave allegations against him should be thoroughly investigated. The details of his sexuality should not.
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
The aforementioned cricket will be front and centre for me, with not much room for anything else.
There is a full round of Premier League matches, the pick of which is probably Newcastle hosting Arsenal on Sunday morning. There’s always something more interesting about a fallen giant, however, and the jungle drums are starting to beat pretty loudly that Erik Ten Hag is on shaky ground at Old Trafford. You can tell that when mastheads start running stories headlined: “The great Manchester United inquest - Erik Ten Hag’s flops just keep plumbing new depths - so who's to blame... and can anybody fix them?” Almost feel sorry for them.
Fulham v Manchester United, Craven Cottage, Sunday 1.30am, SS EPL
The F1 season is well and truly over as a contest, but there is a tangential NZ interest here. Daniel Ricciardo’s excellent showing in Mexico - in the Alpha Tauri that he recently loaned to Liam Lawson - and another flub by Red Bull’s Sergio Perez has increased speculation the Mexican driver might be on his way out. This would open up a seat at Alpha Tauri if Ricciardo was promoted, one Lawson would surely be primed to take.
Brazilian GP, São Paulo, Monday 6am, SS2
It’s a very skinny weekend for me, but I’ll also attempt to catch a bit of the Black Ferns World Cup final redux with England at Mt Smart on Saturday, and for something a bit different, the New York Marathon in the early hours of Monday.
And almost immediately I realise I forgot to reference the Kiwis v Kangaroos final under the Addin Fonua-Blake story. That I will be watching!
I pity the team that meets India in the CWC semis, they are on fire. Could be in for cracker semis though if SA and Australia get through too, 3 high scoring teams. NZ lost their mojo but at least we aren't England.
On a minor sport side good to see Routliffe doing well in year end WTA tournament. Been a great turnaround for her. Venus close to qualifying for men's year end as well. Great effort by both.