Pools of death and pools of life support
Pools of death and pools of life support
A rugby-heavy Week That Was and the #Wahs are ruined in The Weekend That Will Be
With every passing international the sheer imbalance of the Rugby World Cup - just 14 days away! - becomes impossible to ignore and more and more improbable.
As an extremely basic thought exercise I took the two seeded teams from each pool and added the highest-ranked non-seeded team from Pools A and B (Scotland) and Pools C and D (Argentina) to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to the relative strengths of each side of the draw.
Remembering that Pools A and B don’t crossover with Pools C and D until the semifinal stage, just how out of whack is it? It couldn’t be any more imbalanced if you put Tamaiti Williams on a seesaw with Kate Moss.
The decision to determine the pools way back in the Covid days looks, um, flawed.
One of the top five teams in the world is not going to make the playoffs; two very good teams are going to miss out on the semifinals; two very average teams are going to make the final four.
Is it “fair”? No, not really.
Does the early seedings system look bonkers? Yes, absolutely.
It doesn’t, however, change the winning formula: escape your pool; win three knockouts games in a row.
Job done.
As a further indicator of how well placed the All Blacks are to achieve that task, they have named a strong squad to face the Boks on neutral, sold-out territory tomorrow.
NZ v South Africa, London, tomorrow 6.30am, Sky Sport 1
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When you circle back to the same topics there is a danger you get into a feedback loop that begins to look like an infinity circle.
I do think it’s important, however, to clarify one thing about Steve Hansen’s philanthropic contribution to Closer Economic Relations:
It’s not what is being done that’s the issue, it’s who is doing it.
As subscribers like Max have noted, those who spend a lifetime building expertise in a specialist field should be free to choose how they want to employ that knowledge. Plenty have across all sports in ways far more invested than Hansen, like Brendon McCullum and Russell Coutts, for example.
But the reason players like Dane Coles have difficulty wrapping their heads around this one is that Hansen had no respect for such a laissez-faire outlook as coach of the All Blacks. Nobody did more to supercharge the “you’re either with us or against us” credo than him.
Take Brad Shields, who woke up to a headline in the New Zealand Herald that said: “Why All Blacks coaches can’t stand Brad Shields.” It was because he made himself available for England selection.
There was, of course, Graham Henry’s dalliance with Argentina (he even wore a Pumas tracksuit).
“Laughter, disappointment, there were a whole range of emotions,” Hansen said when Henry’s side hustle was announced. He also sniffily noted:
“He’ll be doing a lot of work with their coaches I guess and hopefully not telling them too much about us, but he won’t be able to help himself.”
Hansen is doing nothing wrong in hooking up with his good mate Eddie. It’s trivial. But if you’re going to bang on about unfettered loyalty, you best live it too.
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As for Ian Foster laughing it off, I’m not buying that either.
According to multiple sources, All Blacks management threw a tantrum worthy of a two-year-old denied at the supermarket pick ’n’ mix lolly bins when the New Zealand Herald’s Liam Napier got ahead of the pack and correctly reported the experimental lineup that was put out against the Wallabies at Dunedin.
It was communicated from the top levels of the synod that the a cardinal sin had been committed. Bulls of excommunication were threatened.
That was a dead-rubber test more than a month out from the World Cup that involved a line-up that will never take the field for the All Blacks as a collective again.
But your ex-BFF is now in camp with his new BFF on the eve of the tournament and you find that hilarious.
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More schoolboy footy shenanigans.
According to a well-placed source not directly involved with the team, Feilding High School started their Hurricanes region semifinal against Scots College with a dominant scrum that quickly looked set to overwhelm the Wellington school.
Said the source: “After 10 minutes, Scots had an injury and the game went to uncontested scrums [because they didn’t have a suitable replacement]. The Hurricanes rep at the game told Feilding to appeal after they lost 43-35 and they did and had the result overturned.
“Turns out it should have gone to NZ Secondary Schools Rugby Union.”
The source said that Feilding came to the NZSSRU hearing that followed with their principal and coach; Scots came lawyered up.
“It’s everything that’s wrong with school sport and New Zealand rugby,” the source concluded.
It was a timely note. I was engaged in a casual conversation with the deputy principal of a coed state high school last night and we both agreed there was little way Feilding was going to be allowed to keep that result and what do you know…
Scots appealed their disqualification and at a lengthy New Zealand Secondary Schools Rugby Union online hearing on Thursday night the decision was overturned.
Scots were found to have supplied the incorrect team sheet. It is understood there was a technicality that Feilding contacted the incorrect person at the schools rugby union to lodge their initial protest.
For the past decade it seems, schoolboy rugby has never failed to fail.
THE WEEK THAT WAS
For what it’s worth, which is four-tenths of not much, we talked about the UAE series on The BYC.
More interestingly (well, I think so anyway), we briefly discussed the New Zealand A squad to tour Australia.
With white-ball squads in England ahead of the World Cup, the cupboard was already depleted but New Zealand A is meant to represent the next crop of players ready to step into test cricket. If so, this ‘A’ team should have you worried about the batting depth in this country.
The bowling stocks look okay, but the batting is problematic and strategically, you have to question what the plan is.
Of the 16 players selected for the first-class, red-ball portion of the tour, nine are batters: Muhammad Abbas, Tom Bruce, Leo Carter, Josh Clarkson, Henry Cooper, Dean Foxcroft, Mitch Hay, Nick Kelly, Sean Solia.
Some could be considered allrounders, but for the purposes of this exercise we just want to talk about the batting.
Only Abbas, Foxcroft and Hay are what most would consider young - that is to say, 25 or younger. Clarkson is 26 but the rest are hovering either side of 30, so you presume there is not a lot of untapped talent left to extract from their game.
Generally speaking, modern test batters can be divided up into six categories: >50 average = superstar; 45-50 = world-class; 40-45 = high quality; 35-40 = solid; 30-35 = replacement level; <30 = below standard.
Averages tell crude stories - they’re becoming less and less relevant in white-ball cricket for good reason - but your first-class average remains the best indicator of your ability to play test cricket. Those whose first-class averages are significantly lower than their test averages are rare. The Daryl Mitchells of the world are the exception, not the rule.
Just three of these players - Abbas, Bruce and Hay - have 40+ first-class batting averages.
By the powers of subtraction, that tells you that this ‘A’ side has a lot of batters who are not young and who don’t have persuasive first-class numbers. They’re not on big career upswings. At their very best, they project to be replacement level batters.
They’re good players carving out good first-class careers. In many respects they’re my favourite type of cricketers: grinders who turn up season after season for little money and less glory but make the game better by their presence.
But the ‘A’ team is set up to be a proving ground for the next cadre of potential test batters. In that respect, many of these selections make little obvious medium- to long-term sense.
This was a lost opportunity to look younger and bolder.
To be fair to Bryan Stronach and those at NZC, they can just point to Mitchell and say, “Well, he didn’t debut until he was 28 and you wouldn’t have picked him to average 57 after 18 tests, would you?”
There are still great mysteries in this world that can’t be solved, and as Scotty Stevenson artfully noted, Mitchell is one of them.
Daryl Mitchell — the Dazzler as he has come to be known — is [living] a life that feels very at odds with his own assessment of who he is as a cricketer. To wit: “A domestic battler.”
The Daryl Mitchell we now know is not the Daryl Mitchell no one used to know. Quintessential Kiwi humility notwithstanding, domestic battler is a far cry from what he has become. Domestic battlers, as a rule if not a universal truth, don’t walk past their name in glistening gold leaf on the Lord’s Honours Board, as Mitchell did this week on his way to training. Domestic battlers don’t score test match centuries at the home of cricket, which of course Mitchell did, before scoring another at Trent Bridge and another at Headingley in last year’s three-test series against England. Five others have scored three successive centuries in a test series in England. The four most recognisable are Bradman, Boon, Lara, Dravid.
Not exactly battlers.
Last week, the supernatural powers of Japanese two-way baseball megastar Shohei Ohtani were highlighted on these digital pages.
The story has taken a dark turn with four words that are the scourge of pitchers: ulnar collateral ligament tear.
As he hits free agency, the timing could not be worse. As a one-way star he’s still great, but probably not US$600 million great.
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
What I’m planning on catching this weekend (not very much to be blunt).
And with one punch of a corporate button, saying “Up The Wahs!” is no longer cool. Damn you Artist Formerly Known As Vodafone.
As for the Warriors, they’re still cooler than a team full of Arthur Fonzarellis. Tonight they go for seven wins in a row, one shy of their record.
Oh, and the Broncos travel to the Raiders with a chance to take the lead in the race for the minor premiership after Penrith’s shocking collapse against Parramatta last night - a game that saw them lose key player Jarome Luai with a dislocated shoulder. This also could have a huge bearing on who the Warriors play in week one of the finals. Suddenly the Panthers look fallible.
NZ Warriors v St George Illawarra, Auckland, tonight 8pm, SS4
Canberra v Brisbane, Canberra, tomorrow 9.35pm, SS4
Went along to watch the Tall Blacks twice during their qualification for the World Cup. This is a good team and a number of good players have missed the final 12 for the tournament.
Everything has been pointing to this one game against the USA, but I suspect Pero Cameron will have his sights set on Jordan and a Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Greece and see a real opportunity to escape from a tricky Group C.
USA v NZ, Manila, Sunday 12.40pm, TVNZ+
A decent little early season EPL matchup on Monday morning, with a Saudi-owned club up against a team that lost most of their starting midfield to the Saudi league.
Newcastle v Liverpool, St James’ Park, Monday 3.30am, SS EPL
They’re both at unfriendly times, but the athletics and sprint kayaking world champs continue from Budapest and Duisberg respectively. The kayakers, led by the peerless Lisa Carrington, appear to be going better than the athletes (zero medals). Both events can be found on Sky Sport.
