Queen's Birthday Special
Including the final "Notes from Lord's", a few more notes from the Super Rugby, a noteworthy quote from Reece Walsh, and a not-so-noteworthy one on the Taliban.
It’s been a tough couple of weeks or so for flag-waving fans of New Zealand sport.
Our hockey teams have been stitched up by Australia - the men well and truly.
World squash No 1 Paul Coll was tipped out in the semifinals of the world championships; Joelle King in round three.
Scott Dixon blew the Indianapolis 500 when in position to win; Scott McLaughlin hit the wall.
Ryan Fox lost in a playoff on the European Tour last weekend; Lydia Ko couldn’t break her major drought this morning.
The Warriors… arrrgh.
The Black Caps’ apparent test decline gathered pace in St John’s Wood.
The All Whites were beaten by Peru.
I’m looking out the window and it’s persisting down. Somebody please give me some good news that doesn’t involve seniors golf.
SUPER SHOWING
You could, I guess, point to the Super Rugby playoffs and celebrate the fact three spots are taken by New Zealand sides.
However, it’s the great conceit of the New Zealand rugby fan that we’ll regard that as the bare minimum and lament the fact the Hurricanes couldn’t make it four.
We’ll dig in more detail into the semifinals later this week, but there was a smattering of notables from the quarterfinals.
There was remarkable consistency from the four winners in terms of offensive output. The lowest winning score was the Blues’ 35, the highest the Chiefs with 39. The Crusaders and Brumbies scored four tries each; the Blues and Chiefs five.
I remain stunned that players are still doing unconscionably stupid stuff like Highlanders’ hooker Andrew Makalio, who thrust his shoulder straight into Tom Robinson’s head and then smiled in that mystified “What-did-I-do-wrong?” way when he was brandished the inevitable red. To be fair, I’m guessing the smile is more a defence mechanism than an accurate gauge on his emotions, but it was still disorienting for many.
The Crusaders were unimpressive for the majority of their win against the Reds. The natural assumption is that we will see the Blues host them in the final, but I give the Brumbies a puncher’s chance and the Chiefs even better odds of beating the Crusaders.
I keep hearing that the 23,000 that went to Eden Park for the quarter-final described as a big crowd. Is this dissembling or do we honestly think a half-empty stadium in the country’s only metropolis constitutes “big”?
I’m not sure how to summarise that Hurricanes season. They were by turns sparkling and slumbering, and impossible to get a bead on.
SHOCKING SHOWING
You don’t need me to tell you how bad the Warriors were in their 12-44 loss to Manly. Here’s Reece Walsh making any further commentary on this shocker redundant.
“We just go out there and we sabotage ourselves.
“There’s no other way to put it. We put ourselves under pressure and, you know, we keep doing it every week.
“It’s not good enough. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot. There’s just patches where we just don’t get it right. We just make it so easy for the other team - it’s really frustrating.
“We’ve just got to go home, look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, ‘Do we want to be here? Do we want to be trying for our mates?’
“At the moment, the things we’re tossing up, we’re just not working for our mates beside us. It’s first grade and it’s not good enough.
“We’ve got to get tighter as a group… start working harder for each other.”
Flawless analysis. It would be silly to try to add to it.
NOTES FROM LORD’S #4
Even given New Zealand’s up-and-down form since winning the World Test Championship last year, I have to confess I felt they had ended day two in an almost impregnable position.
The only way they could lose from 236-4 in the second innings and a lead of 225 was by collapsing in a heap and then, given the paucity of England’s batting stocks, succumbing to Joe Root and Ben Stokes.
Which is, of course, what they did.
Yesterday, I highlighted the unfortunate Colin de Grandhomme, who might just about have had the worst day of test cricket possible - run out for a first-ball duck after a brain fade, bowling England’s talisman off a no ball, injured and invalided out of the test - but there were a number of other points to address in powerpoint fashion before the second test starts in Nottingham on Friday.
Top order technique.
It was telling for me that Daryl Mitchell, in just his 10th test, was the only after to try to upset the lengths of the English seamers by meeting the ball earlier. Granted, if it’s not your game, it’s not your game, and you can hardly point to Kane Williamson and his 24 test centuries and plus-50 average and say, “Hey, playing late and from the crease will not work,” but it’s also worth noting that his record in tests in England is comparatively poor.
The batters need to talk about their plans because it wasn’t just the dismissals that were problematic - good bowlers have as much right to take wickets as good batters have to score runs - it was the general passivity, the failure to rotate the strike and even the absence of positive body language that was telling.
Tail-enders attitude.
Just as worrying was the fact that Nos 8-11 felt their only hope of contributing was by hitting out. That means, when the balance of the side is configured with Kyle Jamieson coming in at No 8 you’re basically flipping a coin every delivery from six wickets down to the end. That is not sustainable.
Jamieson and Tim Southee holing out to long leg in the first innings while De Grandhomme was playing well at the other end, and Ajaz Patel essaying a filthy slog in the second innings were particularly egregious examples of gifting wickets.
Another 15-20 hard-fought runs from the tail in each innings could have changed the complexion of the match. It certainly would have brought the second new ball into play in the fourth innings. Having four batters in the line-up with no faith in their defensive technique is at least one too many.
Spin bowling usage.
Late on day three, Joe Root and to a lesser extent Ben Foakes were treating a tiring Southee with dismissive disdain. Patel should have been bowling but Williamson was spooked enough by Stokes’ two-over assault on the left-armer that he never saw the bowling crease again.
Compare this to how Stokes managed legspinner Matt Parkinson, a bowler vastly inferior to Patel. Obviously the circumstances are different when you’re defending a fixed target, but the lack of faith in Patel, particularly once Stokes had been dismissed, was jarring.
On other matters, De Grandhomme’s injury makes it easy for coach Gary Stead to slot Henry Nicholls back into the middle order and to play him alongside Mitchell, who might have to bowl a few overs.
Every time they drop Neil Wagner they seem to regret it, so he might come in for Patel, which would leave no spin options. Either way, with De Grandhomme’s injury, the balance will be out of whack with no genuine allrounder option.
Finally, Root has 10,000 test runs. He’s 31. If anybody has a chance of catching Sachin Tendulkar’s 15921 it’s him because, if you listened to ICC chairman Greg Barclay, it won’t be an option for future players.
Barclay’s interview with BBC’s Test Match Special has brought plenty of heat.
As a disclaimer, I know Greg pretty well and have broken bread with him in days long before he had such Grand Poobah titles alongside his name.
He’s a good bloke, loves cricket on a romantic level but would also consider himself an arch-pragmatist when confronted by a spreadsheet.
Coming from a tiny cricket economy like New Zealand, he is acutely aware that test cricket spends money that white-ball cricket makes. When he gave short shrift to the idea of increasing the volume of women’s test cricket, that was realism. How do you sustain a comprehensive test programme when most countries, including New Zealand, offer no multi-day domestic formats for women.
When he talked about the growing influence of T20 franchise tournaments making it harder to schedule more traditional forms of cricket, particularly for those countries not called India, England or Australia, again he was being realistic. I might not like it, but as much as us traditionalists cry about it, he’s right.
Where Barclay got it horribly wrong was hiring Greg Norman’s PR guy to explain away the resurgence of the Taliban and what it means for women’s cricket in Afghanistan as “something of a blip in that process”.
I’m sure he didn’t mean it to come across with such blase indifference to the Taliban’s horrendous policies around women’s access to education, employment and, of course, sport, but it did.
Might need to take a mulligan on this one, Greg.
UGLY FIGHT CLUB
Pretty shortly we’re going to see calls for dry stadia in Australia as another event was marred by ugly brawling.
This time it was the George Kambosos Jr versus Devin Haney title fight, but it’s just the latest in a fast-growing list of crowd unrest.
The Marvel Stadium fracas follows horrendous scenes at Suncorp Stadium during the NRL’s Magic Round, at the MCG during the Richmond-Essendon clash and another incident at Suncorp Stadium on Anzac weekend when a Broncos ‘fan’ copped a hiding after repeatedly yelling during the minute’s silence.
Dry stadiums have worked well in places like France but nevertheless it’s a fairly damning indictment when you can’t go to a game and have an adult drink with adult friends because others will ruin it for everyone.
Nor does it solve the problem of over-the-top pre-loading.
Dry and wet sections also don’t solve the problems leaving the stadium.
In other words, I have no idea what the answer is, other than for people to stop being idiots.
As for the legal fighting, it was a mixed bunch from the Kiwis. Junior Fa suffered a shock loss to a well-past-his-peak Lucas Browne and will find himself tumbling down the rankings, while David Nyika made harder work of beating last-minute opponent carpenter Karim Maatalla than he should have.
Heavyweight Hemi Ahio, however, moved his record to 19-0 by beating Christian Ndzie Tsoye. It was a disappointing end, with Tsoye suffering an arm injury that kept him in his corner for round two, but Ahio now has a record allied to a watchable style that should command some attention from the bigger matchmakers.
His problem is he’s the sort of boxer that higher-ranked fighters try to avoid and at 31, he needs to get some big fights sooner rather than later.
I'm not convinced it's just Ajaz that KW won't bowl. The only spinner he readily went to is/was Satner and that was always in a "hold up an end" vs "win me a test" mode.