Pining for the Walker bros
Weekend Talking Points include the Highlanders title quest, Andrew Symonds passing, Williamson's epic struggles and shootout drama.
League is an interesting game in that momentum, which is such a nebulous concept in sport, can play such a clear and obvious part in proceedings.
A large part of momentum is mental, ergo - when a try is scored one team feels better than the other, but another part of it is tactical. League kickoffs are invariably long, handing the ball back unchallenged to the try-scoring team and although good kicks pin the opposition deep, they are coming out of their territory at pace and on the front foot.
As the Warriors capitulated to Souths in the opening half - a truly horrendous 40 minutes of professional league - there was a mesmeric quality to the viewing: the Warriors outsides would try to jam the Souths’ attack, get their timing and numbers horribly wrong, Souths wings would stroll over, the Warriors would regroup behind the posts, then kick deep to Souths again and the process would essentially repeat.
It’s a restart orthodoxy that is only rarely challenged, mainly by… oh, these guys.
It’s not the only wrinkle the Walker brothers Ben and Shane have in their tactical grab bag. They also encourage their players to make the extra pass early early in sets which has become the domain of one-out hit-ups by metre-eating robots.
They were in the frame for the Warriors job after new owner Mark Robinson very quickly flicked the off switch on the Stephen Kearney era.
Instead of the Walkers, the Warriors got Nathan Brown, one of the ultimate league insiders who works from the thinnest pamphlet of tricks.
It has resulted in a situation where the Warriors aren’t just also-rans, but desperately dull with their only tactical innovations coming with kicks early in the tackle count and on one occasion preposterously early (tackle zero, Shaun Johnson?).
With Robinson displaying more patience with Nathan Brown than most thought he capable of, it will be intriguing to see what the coach learned from the dramatic but ultimately futile comeback in the 30-32 loss.
When everything was on the line for the Warriors, they stunk; when the game reached no-consequence mode, they felt comfortable enough to express themselves.
If only there were coaches available who could get them feeling comfortable about themselves before matches were lost1.
The Highlanders have won four games, have lost eight, and will almost certainly still have a chance to win a title when the playoffs start in a couple of weeks.
And that, in a nutshell, is your 2022 Super Rugby Pacific season.
OK, so there’s a bit more to it than that. The Blues look fantastic and the Crusaders reasserted their credentials against the Brumbies, but it’s the Highlanders who are providing one of the (silliest) storylines of the season.
Here’s Stuff’s talking points of the weekend, including the Highlanders life-support campaign and Owen Franks “memo” to Ian Foster after a stone-cold call by Hurricanes coach Jason Holland to drag his starting props before halftime against the Waratahs.
Meanwhile, in South Africa… drama.
It sounds like Elton Jantjes damaged a light on a plane.
It’s been an appalling few months for Australian cricket. The death of Andrew Symonds might not have reverberated as loudly because the messy end to his career, captured here in this piece, clouded just how talented and game-changing a cricketer he was.
The catalyst for Symonds’ downward spiral came during the Sydney test against India in January of 2008. The Aussie alleged Harbhajan Singh called him a “monkey” and the accusation caused an international storm.
Symonds said later Singh had actually called him a “monkey” in an earlier ODI series, prompting the Aussie to visit India’s changeroom to speak to the off-spinner and tell him to stop.
According to Symonds, Singh accepted his request at the time but it happened again.
“He said it probably two or three times [in Sydney]. From that moment on that was my downhill slide,” Symonds told Mark Howard on an episode of his Howie Games podcast in 2018.
There doesn’t look to be any danger of Kane Williamson, Devon Conway or Tim Southee being underprepared for the first test against England, with their respective IPL teams on the outside looking in with the playoffs approaching. It might be a different story for Trent Boult and Daryl Mitchell, whose Rajasthan Royals look a real shot to be playing in the grand final on May 30, just a few days before the first test starts at Lord’s on June 2.
While Mitchell is a fringe player - he’s played just twice this IPL and not this month - and could probably negotiate an early release (which would cost him some money), there’s no chance Boult is leaving early, with his man-of-the-match status in the win underlining his importance to the Royals. The tight turnaround between the final and the first test raises the possibility that Boult could miss his second Lord’s test in a row.
With the Sunrisers Hyderabad, Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders all sitting outside the top four, Williamson, Southee and Conway could feasibly be picked for the second warm-up match against a First Class Counties XI, starting May 26.
Some time in the middle facing a red ball could be important for Williamson, who has struggled mightily in the IPL and is, for perhaps the first time in his career in any format, coming under considerable pressure to justify his place in the team.
For the uninitiated, Ben Jones is head of media for data specialists CricViz and the author of “Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works”. He’s not a hater.
It’s been a lucrative weekend for New Zealand golfers, with Ryan Fox finishing second in Belgium on the DP World Tour, Lydia Ko banking a decent cheque on the LPGA Tour for finishing 12th and Steve Alker continues to cash in on the senior tour (or as one headline had it, golf’s greatest mulligan) with a second at The Tradition.
It’s Phil Mickelson in the headlines though, after pulling out of the year’s second major, the PGA Championship, where he is defending champion.
This column in Sports Illustrated, written before Mickelson withdrew, explains neatly why he and Greg Norman have become toxic. Clue: it’s not just because they’re taking on the PGA Tour’s primacy.
Blood money is still money, and that has always been the entire appeal of the Saudi Arabian government’s fledgling golf tour. Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson and their allies can spin about restrictive PGA Tour policies and see who buys it, but the truth has been obvious from the beginning. They want to cash in. They don’t care how they do it, and they are annoyed by people who do care. This is why they keep on disgracing themselves.
Imagine playing 240 minutes of football against Liverpool in two Wembley finals in one season, not conceding a goal and going home with loser’s medals on both occasions. That’s what it feels like to be a Chelsea fan, whose team, across both the League and FA Cups, not only kept the Reds scoreless, but also took them to sudden death in each penalty shootout before losing 11-10 and 6-5 respectively.
The Black Sticks women’s series against Australia was highly competitive despite the 0-2 series loss. It was also, on Saturday at least, near unwatchable. That was the poorest broadcast quality of any top-level international sport I have seen for years, with one dominant camera and a whole bunch of nausea-inducing zooms.
It was a terrible advertisement for the sport, which was a shame because the hockey was good.
THIS WEEK
It’s a shallower than usual Monday newsletter, in part because the highly anticipated independent report into cycling drops officially today. That, and other talking points from the weekend missed here, will be covered off in a special Tuesday edition of The Bounce. Early reports that have interviewed the family of Olivia Podmore, whose alleged suicide precipitated the need for another report, indicate that the document will point to more of the same issue that dog high-performance sport in New Zealand, particularly in Olympic sport: poor leadership and a culture of medals before people.
This is not all on Brown. The Warriors do not actually have many good players outside their front row, which is problematic.
I sometimes feel like I am the only person on earth who was devastated that the Warriors didn't go with the Walkers. The organisation needs to read Moneyball or something, because this strategy of trying to mimic game plans designed for excellent Australian players hasn't yet worked. It's not exactly surprising given that the Warriors are made up of NZ players not signed to Aussie clubs, and journeymen Australians. Yet they just keep doing the same thing with the same mind numbing results.