Roman vandals: ABs messy performance summed up an aimless weekend
PLUS: The Black Caps roll efficiently into another ICC semifinal; and are we surprised we get a Welsh idiot when we laugh at Jarvo?
That was a weird weekend of sport. Like trying to catch water in a sieve, a lot went in but it mostly disappeared without leaving any lasting trace.
No overriding theme emerged, no great drama, few heroes and fewer villains. It was just one of those weekends where there was lots of sporting content but very little of it “sticky”.
Ish Sodhi might disagree after wearing a David Wiese straight drive flush on the forehead during the Black Caps Friday night win but it didn’t take long for grins to replace the worried frowns.
It was the most memorable moment of the match (and kudos to Wiese who turned down a simple single to check on the health of Sodhi).
I’m drifting off topic a bit here and as if to add to the sense of aimlessness, someone cut the cable on our ultra-broken broadband so if this all feels a little disconnected it is because I was, literally disconnected.
In no particular order, let’s traverse some of this haphazard sporting landscape.
WORLD T20
The problem when most of the key games in the group stage are front-loaded is that there is an absence of drama at the back. Right when things should be ramping up with boundless possibilities we instead have contrived storylines.
Cricinfo, the Disney-owned behemoth website that reaches into every corner of the cricket-playing globe, found itself in the awkward position of trying to to convince its millions of consumers in India that there was still a good chance their team would progress, giving rise to out-of-character clickbait headlines about an “Indian subplot emerging” as the Black Caps prepared to face Afghanistan.
By now you know the result so there is no need for a spoiler alert, suffice to say there was no subplot: if New Zealand beat Afghanistan, having previously beaten India, Scotland and Namibia, they were in the semifinals, regardless of subs or plotting.
They did, comfortably as you would expect, setting up a semifinal against world number one side England.
Whether it’s the mostly sterile playing conditions - the Black Caps aren’t a big drawcard in the UAE - the pitch conditions which are mostly sluggish or the unfriendly time zone, this hasn’t been an easy tournament to embrace.
There’s another factor, too, and this is grossly unfair but I’m going to say it anyway: the Black Caps have quite turned what is supposedly the sport’s most dynamic format into something quite formulaic.
To call the players mere functionaries would be doing them a huge disservice but they are role players in the best sense of the word.
They strangled any life out of a potentially tricky matchup against Afghanistan with superb powerplay bowling from Tim Southee (2-24), Trent Boult (3-17) and Adam Milne (1-17). It wasn’t a wicket for spinners so James Neesham came on and took 1-24 off his four, including a bizarre 20th over where he bought the shin-high full toss outside off stump back into vogue.
Chasing 125 for the win, nobody had to get out of second gear as Kane Williamson (40 from 42) and Devon Conway (36 from 32) put together an unbeaten third-wicket partnership of 68.
A big part of me still thinks they have Devon Conway and Daryl Mitchell the wrong way around in the order but hey, they’ve come this far.
They’ll meet England early on Thursday morning and although they’ll start slight underdogs, you know they’ll have a plan and you know they’ll pick 11 players they know are capable of carrying out that scheme.
Meanwhile, on the BYC, we talk dig even shallower into the Black Caps campaign.
ALL BLACKS 47 ITALY 9
If the scoreboard was the only thing you heard or saw about this game, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. If you spliced together the first 20 minutes of each half it would be a video nasty to match anything made by Uwe Boll.
It was telling that the opening line of the pre-test tubthumping referenced the Golden Hour in Stadio Olimpico in 1960, a concession of sorts that the venue was the most interesting thing about the fixture.