See ya later MMXXII, it's been grouse
22 thoughts for the sporting year that was '22.
1. It was the Year of the Black Ferns.
They played and won the two best test matches of the year - the World Cup semifinal and final - and gave us a long overdue refresher course in just how much damn fun the national sport can be if we’re prepared to let go of all the angst-ridden bullshit that too often envelopes it.
One of the not-so-subtle lessons we can learn, also, is that it’s alright to promote superstars and to let said stars be themselves in front of the cameras and microphones (see #9).
It also sealed my belief that Wayne Smith is the finest rugby coach this country has produced, bar none. Yes, he had the advantage of getting a talented core of athletes back from the sevens, and of performing in front of home crowds in all but one of the tests he took the reins for, but do not underestimate his role in the Black Ferns redemption story.
2. The White Ferns’ attempt to win the Cricket World Cup on home soil did not go so well.
Even with a great deal of distance between then and now, and even allowing for the Covid-enforced disruptions that mitigated against home-crowd advantage, this campaign still feels like it was mailed in.
The White Ferns were too reliant on too few and the harsh truth is they were playing a different sport than what was played by the winning Australian side.
Ben Sawyer, who replaced Bob Carter as coach, has a big job to do with limited international-quality stock.
3. It was a year of weird extremes for the All Blacks, but the lows were lower than the highs were high.
The disruption caused by the shocking series loss to Ireland, thrashing at the hands of South Africa at Mbombela and the subsequent comms snafu, and then the SOS-then-stand-down call to Scott Robertson and his assembling team was a crazy, and instructive, moment for the national body.
At the end of the season, which was signed off with a numbing collapse at Twickenham that resulted in a draw from a seemingly impregnable position, it was no clearer as to whether the All Blacks had made any real progress towards the goal of winning a fourth world title in France near year.
My gut feeling is they missed a trick in not abandoning the Ian Foster era and appointing Scott Robertson, but at least with Joe Schmidt and Jason Ryan on board in place of John Plumtree and Brad Mooar, there is muted optimism.
4. The above might be reflective of where New Zealand Rugby, capped ‘R’, is at.
With all that happened on the field - the Crusaders v Blues rivalry restored, the All Blacks and the Black Ferns - it is easy to forget that 2022 was the year where NZR sold off some of its sovereignty, signing a $200 million deal to sell a stake of rugby’s future revenues to US private equity giant Silver Lake.
It has also been a year that has seen the first appointment of a female chair of the national body in Dame Patsy Reddy.
Both are big stories with potentially far-reaching consequences, particularly the Silver Lake saga. Commercial Company, the Richard Thomas-led entity created to administer all NZR’s revenue streams, will be under pressure to make some quick returns but the hard truth remains that the easiest way for NZR to make the money is off the All Blacks winning at historic rates.
5. The Black Caps are in a state of flux.
It has been a disastrous defence of the World Test Championship, the cracks showing when a Kane Williamson-less side was humbled by Bangladesh at Mt Maunganui and then by a poor South African side in Christchurch.
Three winnable tests in England were lost to Bazball, with the failure of our seam-heavy attacks to defend three decent fourth innings targets a clear sign that either the method or the men needed a tweak.
Since then Williamson, definitely our greatest batsman1, probably our best skipper and likely our finest player (though if you want to make a case for Sir Richard Hadlee, feel free), has stepped down the red-ball captaincy and Tim Southee has been elevated - a bold call.
New Zealand continues to be a white-ball tournament force, having made the semifinals of the World T20 in Australia, without getting over the line.
6. World cricket is in a state of flux.
Try to explain to an American how the world of cricket works. You have three minutes. Good luck.
“OK, so you have a bunch of countries, most of which used to belong to the British Empire, that play against each other across three formats. One format uses a red ball (sometimes a pink one) and can take five days, one with a white ball that lasts all day and another with a white ball that lasts four hours.
“The red-ball cricket, called tests, are considered the most important and only 11 countries and one Caribbean conglomeration of sovereign states (including one mainland South American country), are allowed to play them, but in effect only nine do because Ireland, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe lack the necessary first-class infrastructure (namely, three- or four-day red-ball domestic cricket leagues). If we’re being honest, only three countries - Australia, England and India - make money from tests and if they had their way, they’d probably rather just play each other on an annual basis. To that end, some countries play one-off tests, two-test series, some three, there is the occasional four-match series and the Ashes between England and Australia carries five tests.
“You with me? Not really? Still, let’s press on.
“The member boards of each country administer bilateral series between each other across the three formats, but have to make room in their calendars for tournaments run by world cricket’s governing body, the ICC. The World T20, the shortest format of cricket, is played every two years and the World Cup - played as 50-overs per side though the first three tournaments were 60 overs - every four years. There has also recently been introduced a World Test Championship, a one-off final that tries to give meaning to all the bilateral tests played in a two-year window.
“By now you’re no doubt thinking, ‘That’s an awfully fractured, jigsaw-puzzle-like international environment frequently lacking context,’ and you’d be right, but wait, there’s more.
“T20, the shortest and youngest of the formats, has proved wildly popular with broadcasters given it can slot into a four-hour window. Allied to an emerging billionaire class in India and a burgeoning middle class, the Indian Premier League has become one of the richest sports leagues in the world, capable of paying its players more money in a three-month window than players of the recent past earned over their entire careers. That has essentially forced many countries to block those three months from their calendars so their best players won’t have to choose between country and money.
“That could kinda, maybe work but why should India take all the biscuits, right? So Australia has its Big Bash, the West Indies has the CPL, Pakistan the PSL, Bangladesh the BPL, New Zealand the Super Smash and so on. Oh wait, England decided that their T20 Blast wasn’t enough and also started The Hundred (a new, 100-ball format). Oh wait again, there is a lucrative new league, the ILT20 - starting in the United Arab Emirates next year.
“Because you’re unfamiliar with cricket’s history, you’re probably wondering why anybody would bother with the comparatively low-paid grind of test and one-day cricket when there is so much lucrative T20 cricket to be played?
“It’s a bloody good question, and one that will have to be addressed on another day because, I think you can gather, cricket in its current guises DOES NOT WORK.”
7. The report into Olivia Podmore’s tragic death was predictably sickening.
I wrote this in its aftermath:
Over the weekend I spent hours digesting the report stemming from the independent inquiry into cycling, prompted by the death of Olivia Podmore, parsing every line in the search of enlightenment. When I got to page 100-and-something of the 104-page report I realised I needn’t have bothered.
I’d read it all before. The previous reviews were from multiple sports and covered different crises but the central theme remained: the powerlessness of the athlete inside New Zealand’s vaunted high-performance sport system.
(And when I say “vaunted” I mean New Zealand’s elevated place on the not-actually-a-real-thing-but-still-celebrated per-capita medal table.)
It once again highlighted the athlete-welfare shortcomings in New Zealand’s high-performance sports systems and expedited the setting up of an ‘independent’ sports integrity bureau, which was a genuine Bounce scoop. Yay.
However, The Bounce also warned that the new Crown entity would only be effective if it was truly divorced from Sport New Zealand. The early signs are not promising at all.
8. This line, from the above report, should reverberate through the halls of power (but probably won’t because, you know, they’re only in the halls of power because of the sort of practices the quote references).
“Aotearoa NZ’s small sporting community tends to recruit or ‘recycle’ personnel from within ‘the system’. This was referred to as ‘shoulder tapping’, the ‘old boys’ club’, and ‘jobs for mates’. We perceive an over-reliance on bringing in recruits that people already know (even, in some cases, where past performance has been suboptimal). This curtails attempts to ensure diversity, introduce new ideas, and in some instances maintains and rewards poor behaviour.”
9. Grace Nweke emerged as the future of netball - if Netball NZ will let her be that.
You hear a lot of doom and gloom about sports that hold a special place in NZ’s history, like rugby and cricket, but no ‘major’ sport is in quite as precarious a position as netball, which has remained New Zealand’s primary team sport for women by virtue of having the only effective grassroots operation.
The success of the Black Ferns at both 15s and sevens, and the emergence of lucrative franchise T20 tournaments for women - a women’s Indian Premier League could be a genuine game changer - means netball’s stranglehold on the best female athletes is no longer guaranteed.
It’s a sport that desperately needs some cut-through stars and some, dare I say it, genuine controversy and talking points because I suspect we’ve already reached a point where young girls are finding the likes of Ruby Tui, Portia Woodman and Melie Kerr more inspirational and aspirational than the Silver Ferns.
I had the fortune to sit down with Nweke for a couple of hours for the above linked piece. She is mightily impressive and is yet to turn 21. Here she is, addressing the frequent abuse she has endured since taking up the sport.
“There were times it was harder to let something go but if I responded to everything that was aimed at me it would have taken too much out of me,” she says, before delivering a line that seems so worldly (and sad) you have to double check that it’s a 20 year old who has just delivered it.
“I didn’t want to play into those ‘angry black woman’ tropes.”
10. Val Adams retired. An Olympian worthy of a place on Mt Olympus, Adams bowed out following a Tokyo shot put bronze to supplement the Rio silver and golds at London and Beijing.
She departed with a film, “More Than Gold” and despite the uniformly positive hometown reviews I found it middle of the road and surprisingly unfulfilling fare. Each to their own, I guess.
Adams legacy to New Zealand sport should extend well beyond her career and if nothing else, she should stand as a testament as to how much potentially untapped athletic talent is waiting to be discovered in the deciles we too often overlook.
11. Lisa Carrington v Aimee Fisher was a paddle-off for the ages that didn’t just pit two superb athletes against each other, but also the System v the Outsider.
The two kayakers were chasing the one seat available for New Zealand in the K1 500m for the world championships in Nova Scotia, Canada.
The System won.
It sounds a little Orwellian, but that would be doing Carrington a grave injustice. She might be an ‘insider’, but she’s also an athletic freak and the country’s most successful Olympian.
She duly won the K1 500m world champs by 1.28s, a huge margin. She also picked up the K1 200m gold. I never saw Peter Snell run but the only Olympic athlete I can think of who I’ve seen radiate the same calm authority also sat in a boat on a lake, the difference being that Hamish Bond went backwards.
Let’s hope that in 2023, the sport can find a space for Fisher, too.
12. It took doing this exercise for me to remember the Winter Olympics happened this year.
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Nico Porteous - how do you forget that!
13. Sports journalism here feels as flimsy as it’s ever been, with opinion and furniture (fixed-format pieces on a set day each week) having permanently replaced angle- and feature-driven reporting2.
Looking at the two biggest news websites, the New Zealand Herald has a clear and obvious advantage in breaking the big men’s rugby yarns, while Stuff wins out pretty much everywhere else.
If you want really interesting stuff, however, dig around in places like The Spinoff, Locker Room, sportsfreak.co.nz, occasionally Radio New Zealand and, ahem, Substack, where you’ll find this and the wee gem that is Rich Irvine’s Sport Review!
14. Spark Sport gave it a half-decent nudge but at the first sign of trouble they blinked, then folded.
15. The Commonwealth Games have no real justification in a modern sports calendar, but who cares?
They’re a bit of harmless fun.
Nobody since the early days of Black Sabbath has rocked Birmingham as hard as Aaron Gate, who won four golds on the track and road with his heavy metal haircut.
Ellesse Andrews, with three golds and a silver, showed at 22 that she is also an exceptional talent on the boards.
16. Fifa did not deserve the great World Cup that was served up in Qatar.
Lionel Messi probably did (for the purposes of this exercise I will choose to ignore that he spruiks for Saudi Arabia and that regime’s probable 2030 World Cup bid).
17. I discovered that even with the best will in the world, I can no longer pretend to be interested in either the A-League or the Australian National Basketball League.
I do worry this makes me a lesser sports junkie, but to make up for it my interest in the NZ NBL has been re-piqued, while my son’s fanaticism has rekindled my love of England’s Premier League, so I'm by no means lost to those sports.
I do believe, however, that Basketball NZ does a lousy job of promoting and marketing the Tall Blacks, who are really good.
18. Roger Federer and Serena Williams retired and although I’m not going to say they were the respective men’s and women’s GOATs, I will say watching tennis has become a lesser cherished pursuit now.
19. There is something so incredibly icky about the LIV Golf v The Establishment.
There really are no good guys to root for here, but Rory McIlroy is probably the closest thing so… boo to LIV, go the PGA!
This is a deep dive into the battle for golf’s soul (if it actually exists). It’s worth a read.
But a point that cannot be stressed enough, and arguably fuels the desire to make LIV Golf ultimately succeed, is [Crown Prince Mohammed] bin Salman’s quest for total and absolute power, [author Karen] House says. They are sentiments at the heart of bin Salman’s reign.
“Despite sweeping social and economic changes that have liberated society, political life has moved in reverse,” House explains.
Bin Salman has continually and sometimes ruthlessly silenced dissidents. Human rights are oppressed… A 2017 purge of nearly 400 princes, businessmen and religious leaders consolidated authority over every branch of the government. Saudis began calling bin Salman “Mr. Everything.” He does what he wants; the only person bin Salman answers to is his father, and House says bin Salman has his father’s total support.
20. I had some fantastic contributors this year. Thanks to one and all and apologies if I missed one.
Andrew Cornaga and his camera.
Isaac Ross and his beautiful letter to his mother.
Justin Paul and his wonderful letter to his son.
Brian Finn and his passion for buildings that house games.
Scotty Stevenson and his mateship, his wit, his wisdom and his wordsmithery.
Eric Thompson and really fast cars and bikes.
Melodie Robinson and her spectacular teammates.
And obviously all my readers, who provide a regular stream of intelligent and welcome feedback.
21. Next year we will hear a lot more about CTE.
And the year after, and the year after that.
22. A final thought for the ones we’ve lost this year, lowlighted by the death of Pele to colon cancer in the early hours of this morning.
Doddie Weir, whose brave fight against MND captured hearts around the world, died just weeks after appearing at the All Blacks test against Scotland at Murrayfield. Boston Celtics legend, the great Bill Russell, also died.
Australia fell into collective mourning when Shane Warne died suddenly in Thailand in March. His death followed the untimely losses of Rod Marsh and preceded that of Andrew Symonds - a grim few months for Australian cricket.
We had a number of sports personalities to grieve for here, including three Pasifika rugby stars in Va’aiga Tuigamala, Joeli Vidiri and Willie Los’e.
The latter was also a big player in the world of media, as was my former long-time Herald colleague David Leggat, who died while on a family holiday in Italy.
The Bounce will be back in the New Year. Take care out there and thanks again for making this newsletter possible. I love putting it together, I hope you get a small kick out of it too.
And before you come at me league fans, I know I didn’t mention the Warriors above but take it from me, 2023 is our year.
Some of the narrative around Williamson’s ‘drought-breaking’ 200 not out against Pakistan this week has been baffling. This is Williamson’s string of scores, oldest to newest, since he last scored a test century: 13, 1, 49, 52 not out, 18, 24, 2, 15, 31 and 48. Certainly not great by his standards but hardly desperate. A drought is a catastrophic event, 10 innings without a test century (something Williamson has been through four times in his career - longest 18 innings) is not one.
Irony alert!
Ripper Dylan. Morepower to your keyboard/fingers
Happy new year
Fantastic summary. Thankyou for a great year of work. Reminded me of the moments, some of which I’m embarrassed to have missed. One reason I subscribe.
And hey. Put up your price. You have market power and everyone else with that power is expanding their margins. You deserve it.
Cheers