The loss of Warney leads a WTF weekend
PLUS: More McCrory furore, and a White Ferns thriller.
Quite a lot happened in the hours immediately following my last newsletter, things that in their own ways could be filed under: “WTF!?”
Many of us woke up the same way on Saturday, with a text from a friend or one of those news notifications that you forgot to turn off for the weekend. It would have told you Shane Warne had died. Again, if you were like me and in a half-sleep state, you would have at first dismissed it as slightly old, horrendously misidentified news about Rod Marsh, whose death was announced on Friday.
The dream-state is always replaced by reality and the homepages of all the major news sites might have different takes on world events but unless you’re a tin-foil hat wearer, they never lie in unison.
Shane Warne really was dead.
WTF?!
I’ve spent the weekend scouring some of my favourite internet hidey-holes looking for the signature piece that sums up what Warne means, but nothing has quite hit the mark.
I’ve read the high minded. While Barney Ronay has some lovely lines, including this wonderful scene-setter - “Oh, Warnie. What have you got up to now?” - it still devolves into a well written yet bullet-pointy appraisal of all the good and not-so-good parts of his life.
I’ve read the low-brow, where to gain currency you try to compare Warne to footballers, before simply giving up:
He had the celebrity of Beckham, but was better. He had the charm and boisterousness of Gazza, but his quality has endured. He was as legendary as Ronaldo, but more fun. He was an incomparable sportsperson.
I’ve tried to avoid the obvious crap, which you can usually identify by looking at the headlines and blurbs, like this doozy from the Sydney Morning Herald (metered $):
Neither the cricketing great nor his loyal friends could have known that the less than a day he spent at Samujana Villas would be his last.
Ah right, at least I know now that unexpected deaths happen unexpectedly… and that his friends were the “loyal” type.
Warne’s meaning, if you want to call it that, was that he was a genius legspin bowler. The best that ever lived. He turned cricket’s nerdiest artform into something cool. He added “Bowling, Shane”, into the backyard cricket lexicon and convinced drunk uncles that they, too, could bowl a flipper.
Everything else that followed - the controversy, the biographies both authorised and unauthorised, the musical, the pop-culture icon status - were a direct result of mastering that one difficult art.
There were no hidden depths to Warne. He was an ordinary bloke who made an extraordinarily difficult thing look easy.
The blurb for Paul Barry’s biography (which Warne hated), read: “He is a walking paradox. He is supremely confident, yet profoundly insecure. He is brilliant but also a buffoon. He is generous and thoughtful, but utterly self-obsessed. This book is the search for why.”
No search was needed.
In almost every respect Warne was just a typical suburban male, just one that could rip a legspinner from a foot outside leg to clip the top of off stump.
There’s the meaning of Warne.
On Friday I led with the crumbling edifice of CTE denial in the wake of the plagiarism scandal enveloping Paul McCrory, that movement’s biggest champion.
I hoped the story would move largely from the Twitter accounts of academics to the mainstream and it did, remarkably quickly.
Given his obstinance in the past to acknowledge a definitive link between head trauma suffered in sport and CTE, and his seeming ability to remain impervious to criticism, this was also a bit of a WTF?! moment.
Many remain pessimistic that McCrory’s downfall will fundamentally change the CISG or Big Sport’s acceptance of CTE science.
Others take a more glass-half-full position.
Maybe I’m swayed more by hope rather than firm evidence, but perhaps those who have aligned themselves with McCrory and his description of the NFL’s concussion crisis as “all that carry-on and hoo-ha you get from the United States”, will be moving themselves quietly into the background.
To complete my trio of WTF?!s, I present the White Ferns ill-fated opening to the World Cup.
The opener against the West Indies at Bay Oval was a cracking game of cricket with one of the strangest denouements you’ll see.
If that finish had been ever-so-slightly different we’d be talking in different tones but as it was it served to highlight some of the biggest concerns: Can the Ferns’ middle-order get them home when the Big Four at the top of the order falter; and can the bowling attack keep the lid on the scoring?
Outside the Kerr sisters Jess and Amelia, New Zealand bowled poorly while handing the West Indies a flying start, which opener Hayley Matthews turned into a beautifully controlled 119.
Still, a target of 260 on a ground with a lightning-quick outfield didn’t seem too onerous with such a strong top four. It seemed even less onerous when viewing the West Indies efforts at catching, which were pathetic.
However, rare failures by Suzie Bates (3, unluckily run out) and Amelia Kerr (13, inexplicably missed a bog-standard delivery from a spinner), exposed a fickle middle order.
Despite the run rate being in control, Lea Tahuhu (6) was promoted ahead of Maddie Green (9) and Brooke Halliday (3).
The experienced Katey Martin stopped the rot, first supporting Devine (108) and then Jess Kerr, who added urgency and impetus.
With the game on a high wire, Martin and Kerr batted superbly seemingly sealing the match with a 14-run 49th over.
The West Indies were in a hole. New Zealand with wickets in hand and two set players had to score just six from the final over to win. The Windies’ position so precarious they turned to Deandra Dottin, who hadn’t yet made an appearance at the bowling crease.
Five balls and three wickets later the West Indies had won by three runs.
WTF?!
Martin missed a straight ball, Kerr skewed to mid-off and a panicked Hannah Rowe sent back a panicked Fran Jonas after missing a ball from the unpanicked Dottin, only to be caught well short of her ground.
It was an inexplicable collapse. It was a terrific game of cricket.
New Zealand now need to beat some good teams (at the time of writing their second match against Bangladesh was delayed by rain) to make the semifinals.
Let the drama continue.
THIS WEEK
It’s a busy week, with The BYC podcast adding a couple of World Cup specials as well as the usual Wednesday offering. The first one drops tomorrow, so I’ll post that along with some leftover sport from the weekend that hasn’t been touched yet, including Super Rugby.
The Bounce will also look after to the long-awaited start of Super Rugby Aupiki and the NRL.
