The law of diminishing returns
Warriors again win ugly; NPC put on notice; Kiwis keep driving and riding things fast.
“Win pretty, win ugly, just win.” - Venus Williams
The Warriors look like they’re running on fumes now. If you’re glass half-full you’re glad it’s happening now and not next month; if you’re glass half-empty you’re fearing this is a precursor to a death spiral.
July 16 was the last time the Warriors put together a truly persuasive performance. On that day they defeated the Sharks 44-12 at Mt Smart and since then they’ve applied the law of diminishing returns.
In the week before their final bye of the season they blew what should have been an unassailable lead to the Raiders and escaped with a golden-point victory. The week following the bye they made awfully hard work of beating the 13th-placed Titans who played three-quarters of the match with 12 men.
On the weekend they were lacklustre against the wooden spoon-elect Tigers in front of a partisan Hamilton crowd. In this case, lacklustre is a euphemism.
The superstars - Shaun Johnson, Addin Fonua-Blake and Dallin Watene-Zelezniak - were good (AFB was better than good) but some of the role players look like they have no more juice left to squeeze.
When Wayde Egan departed following a forearm to the trachea, the timing out of dummy half was at least half-a-click out, ball security was poor and normally reliable Mitch Barnett put together his worst 10 minute passages of the season, spilling two kickoff returns and missing a tackle that led to a try.
The Tigers, playing with the sort of fearlessness that comes with a lost season, also exposed what has emerged as a flaw with the playoffs looming: defensive decision-making, particularly on the edges and early in the tackle count.
The last month has been ugly football on top of scratchy football but here’s the rub: they’ve won all those games, including the 30-22 flubfest against the Tigers (who should be heartily thanked for bringing a home game to NuZild).
“It wasn’t one of our better ones,” a deadpan Andrew Webster said in the post-match presser, before bemoaning the soft nature of the tries they conceded.
It feels extraordinary to be in position to complain about an unbeaten month in the NRL and that demonstrates better than any stat the rapid progress made under Webster. The Warriors are guaranteed a place in the finals for the first time since 2018 and two wins in the final three matches against Manly Warringah, St George Illawarra or Redcliffe will secure a top four spot (and they could still finish top four with one more win).
If they secure that spot early, they could use the final week/s to iron out some kinks ahead of a week one trip to either Penrith or Brisbane. Kinks that both Webster and Tohu Harris maintain are mental, not tactical.
Their football of late has been no oil painting, but for long-suffering Warriors’ fans, that is a picture-perfect scenario.
***
I read this story and my first thought was, “please, no”.
The Warriors look more likely to host a playoff game at Eden Park rather than Mt Smart Stadium at the end of the season…
A finals game at [Mt Smart] would sell out in minutes and by having it at Eden Park it would give more of the club’s fans the opportunity to see a playoff game in Auckland for the first time in 15 years.
Mt Smart is not a great stadium. It’s not even a good one, but it is the Warriors home. There is the essence of league snaking through the cruddy stands and chip stands that has never been replicated when moving games to Eden Park (which, incidentally, is not a great stadium either).
On second and third thoughts, however, the idea is growing on me. This is a thoroughly likeable Warriors team: the opportunity for 45,000 New Zealanders to see an NRL playoff game probably outweighs the sentimental aspects of having 25,000 pay for the pleasure in their spiritual home.
And perhaps it is cursing the whole project to even talk about such luxuries as a home final.
Shush, for now.
Speaking of Eden Park.
The family circumnavigated the country’s largest and least free-flowing city to get to and from the World Cup quarter-final on Friday night.
It was worth it.
It was a terrific game, with Sweden using their superior size and strength to completely outmuscle Japan for three-quarters of the match. As so often happens with football, that two-goal buffer is a curse. Sweden suddenly sat back and played the clock.
Just like that, it was Japan overrunning Sweden. The match finished 2-1 with Sweden clinging on by their fingernaglars.
A night later, Australia and France dished up more drama by way of the penalty shootout. Depending on where you sit on the matter, this was compelling evidence that shootouts are a) cruel and unconscionable, b) the greatest spectacle in sports.
As mentioned last week, bring them on.
(WARNING: The next sentence might prove triggering for cricket fans - please skip to the next section if you are squeamish.)
As a way of deciding a match, it sure beats a boundary countback.
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To continue the stadia theme, it’s not just Aucklanders complaining about inappropriate facilities. Mark Geenty knows:
Nearly 25 years old, Wellington Regional Stadium with the apt baking-inspired nickname remains unfit for (multi) purpose. Trying to be too many things to too many sports, it succeeded in being a comfy fit for none of them - including cricket which inspired it to be built as a vast, soulless oval and hosted way too many forgettable white ball contests on a dubious drop-in pitch.
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The Daily Mail seems especially titillated by the idea that not only are some elite women footballers gay, but that they also may have been involved in more than one relationship over the course of their lives. It gives them an irresistible opportunity to get “love triangle” in a headline ahead of this week’s blockbuster ‘Ashes’ semifinal and it’s fools like me who click on it and feed the algorithm that will keep encouraging them to do so.
To save you the trouble: Australian superstar Sam Kerr is going out with a footballer who used to go out with another footballer.
No laws were broken.
A few mildly interesting rugby yarns to ponder.
Stuart Barnes continues his crusade to have Sam Cane erased from the All Blacks.
Said Barnes in his Times column (per Stuff):
Ian Foster has stuck with Sam Cane and weakened his team in the process. The All Blacks’ best back row has no room for the 31-year-old Cane. The balance of Shannon Frizell, Dalton Papali’i and Ardie Savea is their dominant combination.
Barnes, a former international flyhalf, is perfectly entitled to his opinion, but the timing seems off and his reasoning a little illogical.
There were many, including myself, who believed Cane was the wrong choice as captain given that it was by no means clear cut that he was the best number seven in the country back when he was handed the role by Foster. I would have argued that Savea was a better option at openside and he might still be, but he has been playing No8 for some time now and even if he is on the small side for the back of the scrum, he has always played ‘bigger’ than he is.
But Cane has been largely excellent this season for both the Chiefs and All Blacks. He endured a sketchy first half in Dunedin against the Wallabies, but show me an All Black who didn’t.
Papali’i might be younger and more obviously athletic, but it Cane’s crunching physicality and 89-test experience will be more useful, as a starter at least, in France.
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He’s not the only captain of a major team under fire, with Owen Farrell in the crosshairs following England’s narrow victory over Wales.
So here we go again. Owen Farrell in high shoulder charge trouble? Tick. England flattering mostly only to deceive? Tick. Injuries and unavailability threatening to disrupt their World Cup? Tick. Tick. They may have finally won a match but, in truth, an air of weary Groundhog Day familiarity hangs over English rugby that extends well beyond the length of ban awaiting their national captain before next month’s global tournament.
Farrell will certainly be experiencing a powerful sense of deja vu as he awaits the verdict on Tuesday, which is almost certain to sideline him from his team’s keynote opening pool game in France. As recently as January he was lucky not to miss the start of this year’s Six Nations championship after a longer suspension was reduced to three weeks because he agreed to attend World Rugby’s “tackle school”. Does that mean, as several wags have observed, that he is now eligible for a masters degree?
Further down, Guardian rugby columnist Robert Kitson writes the unthinkable.
So what next for Farrell and his team after another frequently uncomfortable and fretful 80 minutes? Removing him entirely from the equation, from the management’s perspective, is akin to losing the central pole of the whole red rose marquee. As captain, goalkicker, competitor-in-chief, tactical fulcrum and centre option, there is no more conspicuous absentee.
There is a school of thought, though, that going Farrell-free… might not be completely unhealthy.
He’s a bit of a pest and not the player he was four years ago, but playing England without Farrell is still a more appealing prospect than playing them with him.
***
It is not news at all that the NPC is is struggling, particularly when it comes to engagement in terms of both the media - it is barely covered by major mastheads and news sites now - and walk-up crowds, but there seems to be more urgency around the question of what to do with it.
“We’ve said that regardless of the Silver Lake injection of capital into the game, the model we’ve got at the moment is not fit for purpose,” Robinson said on Breakdown. “We’re working really hard with all the different people involved to make sure we can try to address that, but it’ll take time.”
It’s a bit vague and there was really no further indication as to what that “hard work” will look like and - as a third layer of professional rugby - what fit-for-purpose actually means or looks like.
At its most radical, do all 26 unions actually need to be running high-performance or even rep programmes, or should their focus be solely on community and club competitions?
Shane van Gisbergen found things a little tougher in his second race in the Nascar Cup series at the Indianapolis infield course, but still bagged a top 10 finish after qualifying eighth. Given his comments on the “mind numbing” qualities of this year’s Supercars racing, it was slightly awkward for SVG to find himself in such a dull, processional race with barely any yellow flags and minimal overtaking, but he seemed happy with how things went.
He wasn’t the Kiwi motorsport story of the weekend, however. That would be the ageless Scott Dixon winning at the same track two days earlier. Remarkably, Dixon was spun out on the first lap, which pushed him to the rear of the field.
It’s the 19th season in a row that he has claimed a victory and although he’s not going to catch AJ Foyt in the overall race wins, he’s going to make it very hard for anybody to take second off him. To burnish his status as a racer’s racer, he also assed Tony Kanaan for consecutive race starts, with 319.
Two wheels now.
Sam Gaze’s silver in the Olympic-discipline cross country MTB was even more impressive than his gold in the short-track. The Rotorua rider got caught in traffic on the start loop that opens the race and found himself in a lowly 36th before whittling away the deficit.
He passed 10-time world champion Nico Shurter with a lap to go but couldn’t reel in the brilliant Tom Pidcock, the favourite to win next year’s Olympic cross country.
“It shows that I know how to be ready for the big days, which is important coming into Olympic year. I have every intention of going one place better [in Paris],” Gaze said.
It was a good day for the Kiwis, with Anton Cooper also coming from a long way back to score a top 10 finish.
TYPOS & ASSORTED EDITING CRIMES
If it wasn’t obvious before Friday, I edit my own copy. Most days I have plenty of time to read what I’ve written and push out a newsletter that might not be squeaky clean, but it at least makes sense. Friday was one of those days where the imperfect storm hit: a late phone call meant some significant last-minute changes and I needed to be somewhere in a hurry. I let it fly and it was… a mess. Words were missing, an entire name was missing and there was an apostrophe crime lurking there in the background. I can only apologise and encourage you to bin that email and read a far cleaner version of the lead item here.
For those who managed to find their way through the fog and still left feedback, thanks.
A minor point, given all the good stuff in the post, but I did appreciate the trigger warning. I will admit I am vaguely dreading the inevitable endless goddamn repeats in the upcoming tournament in India.
The Sam Cane conundrum is an interesting one. I note he regularly tops the tackle count and is a physical defender too, but I’ve never been convinced he’s good enough to hold down the seven jersey let alone captain the side. To me there’s too much he doesn’t do - he’s not prominent with the ball in hand and he doesn’t get over the ball much. The comparison may be unfair but Reuben Thorne and Todd Blackadder come to mind - you could watch them and see they were working hard but they just weren’t making an impact in the black jersey. The argument will be made that Cane’s just not “that” kind of player and he does the hard work in dark places, but is that a role of an AB’s 7? The presence of superman Savea has probably covered his deficiencies when you think about it...