The madness continues
PLUS: Ian Foster tackles his 'legacy', and why losing is not life or death.
Quick note: With the RWC in the rearview, The Bounce will return to a more standard schedule, though there will be cricket specials when required up until the Black Caps either win it or bow out! On that subject…
This Cricket World Cup is bananas.
How to best sum it up in a line: England, pre-tournament second favourites to win the tournament, has one win after six matches and is last on the table; Afghanistan, serious candidates for the wooden spoon, have three wins and sit one place outside the semifinal slots.
Being on Rugby World Cup final weekend, it also went barely noticed that New Zealand and Australia played out one of the most sensational games of cricket in ODI history.
How Jimmy Neesham, who must have surely played his way into the preferred XI ahead of Mark Chapman, must be sick of final over dramas falling just the wrong way. He batted brilliantly to give New Zealand a chance, but he’ll have replayed that thigh-high full toss on the penultimate ball that he could only scuff to the boundary sweeper many times over.
For those who have had their attention diverted thus far, here’s each team in three words or less.
India - Well-oiled machine
South Africa - Six appeal
New Zealand - The Rachin Show
Australia - Flawed, but looming
Sri Lanka - Under the radar
Pakistan - So, so Pakistan
Netherlands - Always optimistic
Bangladesh - Frustratingly hopeless
England - Hey, don’t laugh
While the table looks like it has a distinct top four, bottom six divide already, the team best poised to make a late run is probably Pakistan.
New Zealand’s match against them in Bengaluru on November 4 shapes as pivotal, especially if the Black Caps succumb to South Africa in Pune tomorrow.
The undoubted star of New Zealand’s campaign has been Rachin Ravindra. Stuff’s Ian Anderson charts his rise from spare-parts player to a guy who should now be a fixture for New Zealand across formats for the next decade.
Former Black Caps fast bowler Shane Bond said: “We’ve got a new superstar for New Zealand.”
“To have a player like him, who’s 23, bowls decent enough left-arm orthodox, opens the batting in four-day cricket - he’s going to be a cornerstone of the team across formats in years to come.
“He just seems like he’s got so much time and his decision-making is excellent.”
Meanwhile, here’s where it all went wrong for England.
Some of the players England planned to rely on – Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root, Mark Wood, Ben Stokes and Liam Livingstone – had not played a 50-over game for more than a year when they turned up for the first match of September’s series against New Zealand (and Gus Atkinson had only ever played two). The assumption was that they were experienced enough to click straight into gear and stay there, but England’s assumptions have turned out not to be very reliable.
As a final word that may well not be a final word on the World Cup final, having read a bunch of the feedback via email and the comments section (which I haven’t had the time to personally answer, sorry), from a New Zealand perspective there are three competing storylines that don’t necessarily conflate, yet can be true all at once.
For the most part, the All Blacks played poorly, particularly that first half hour. It’s hard to say whether they strategically got it wrong, because their skill execution and indiscipline never allowed us to see a fully formed plan.
Reduced to 14 men for all but 15 minutes of the match, they also performed stoically and some even heroically, a point acknowledged by Siya Kolisi in the aftermath. In particular, Mark Tele’a, Ardie Savea and Jordie Barrett put in the monstrous shifts, which made the critical miss by the latter all the more piteous.
The TMO was an overbearing and unwelcome presence for many during the final, regardless of the accuracy or (in)consistency of the decision-making. As an aside, the vitriol aimed at Wayne Barnes is pathetic. This is not on him, nor is it really even on TMO Tom Foley, this is a mess of World Rugby’s making. Even Sir Clive Woodward says so. I’m led to believe that high-level concerns have previously been raised with World Rugby about the direction of the decision-making protocols since Stuart Berry, a former South African Super Rugby referee, was appointed their TMO consultant; specifically the idea that the officials have been ‘encouraged’ to find more reviewable incidents. Knowing WR, it’s unlikely anything will come of this but hopefully they will soon realise that the attempt to eliminate grey areas from a game that has for an eternity been a battle for the grey areas, is ultimately doomed to fail.
It’s in the books. All there’s left to ponder is words like “legacy”.
Liam Napier puts that word under the microscope when assessing Ian Foster’s ($). There are some fascinating lines in there.
Foster was never welcomed, never loved, from the outset of his All Blacks tenure.
“Everyone in the country has a different filter of how they view you,” an emotional Foster said as he reflected on a personally taxing ride in his final press conference as All Blacks head coach... “They’ve got a filter where they didn’t want you in the first place so they filter everything you do based on that. And that’s okay.”
The All Blacks head coaching role comes with unparalleled demands and pressure but for Foster, there was no honeymoon.
This is true. Even those, including journalists, who consider themselves open minded are shaped by inherent prejudices. Those who believed from the start that Scott Robertson was a better option (and I’d include myself in that number), are more likely to sheet All Black failures back on the coach rather than the cattle. If Robertson had got the job and put together identical results over the first three years of his tenure, we’d almost certainly be more forgiving.
World Cup year began with New Zealand Rugby determining it would appoint a new head coach prior to the pinnacle event for the first time in history. Foster repeatedly criticised his employer for that decision, saying it undermined his team’s World Cup preparations.
“I disagreed with how this year went. I said that publicly. I disagreed with some decisions New Zealand Rugby made on the basis of what I felt was the best thing for this team. It wasn’t based on my desire to coach beyond this World Cup,” Foster said. “And I stand by that.”
Foster might stand by it, but to my mind it’s a water-weak argument that paints his players as immature and unable to deal with the fairly standard vicissitudes of professional sport. They’re meant to be All Blacks, the masters of shutting out the noise and just winning. And if Foster let it hamper his own World Cup preparations, that’s on him, quite frankly.
Foster significantly elevated his status and altered perceptions with the New Zealand rugby public by leading the All Blacks to a World Cup final.
This is not Foster saying this, but Napier. He might be right, but possibly not to the extent he imagines. I must have had 20 or so messages or conversations with people in the past couple of days who’ve come at me along the lines of “in the end, the All Blacks won one big game in two months”. It’s probably unfair, but I’ve run out of energy to argue too hard.
Finally:
And so, his enduring legacy depends on who you talk to…
“What I’ve learned in the last four years is how I want to be remembered doesn’t really matter because everyone else is going to write their views and it’s hard to compete with that. I’m not sulking saying that. That’s the truth.”
And that is, as he said, the truth.
The small margins didn’t just deny New Zealand a fourth World Cup triumph, it also condemned the last four years of All Black rugby to be a largely unsatisfying holding pattern.
A World Cup win would have nicely removed some stains from the carpet, instead the only thing you can say about 2019-2023 (and possibly even 2017-23) is that New Zealand still has the Bledisloe Cup.
But there are others in a far worse position.
Like our Bledisloe neighbours.
The whole Eddie Jones situation defies belief but Hamish McLennan, the architect of this clusterduck of a situation, the man who magicked up the whole “Eddie Jones is our saviour” scenario, looks set to brazen it out, telling the Sydney Morning Herald:
“I want to stay to deliver the 2027 World Cup in Australia,” McLennan told [the] masthead... “That has always been the big prize for Australian rugby.
“More destabilisation will just make matters worse just when we’re about to break through. Life is not a continuous line of perfect calls and success. I came to rugby to find a way to fix it when it all fell over and despite the sad Eddie situation, this is another hurdle we’ll overcome.”
Sad Eddie situation?
Really?
How about the completely avoidable Eddie situation, Hamish?
Jones was typically quotable, right to the end:
“Sometimes, you’ve got to eat a bit of shit for the people to eat the nice buffet a few years later and maybe I’ve had to eat a bit of shit to do it.”
More to the point, this whole calamity would have been avoided if Mclennan hadn’t swallowed Jones’ BS.
You know that trite saying about losing not being life and death. Every now and then something happens to make you realise just how true it is.
This story is, however, and it’s horrific. Adam Johnson, a 29-year-old professional ice hockey player, Had his throat slit by the blade of a skate during a game in England and died as a result.
I pity all those on the ice with Adam Johnson also, and anybody in the arena. While incredibly rare, deaths have occurred in this manner in amateur hockey, and in the NHL Buffalo Sabres goalie Clint Malarchuk in 1989 and Florida Panthers winger Richard Zednik in 2008 were horrifically injured in this manner but survived.
This Bleacher Report feature (back when Bleacher Report was good), on Malarchuk is visceral (NB. It deals with suicide).
The two-sentence lede is something.
The first time around, Clint Malarchuk did not want to die. The second time, 19 years later, he didn’t give a damn.
I've seen next to no vitriol pointed at Barnes. Or Cane. Or Foster. I think sports fans have moved on largely from the attitudes of say the late 90s where coins were thrown at John Harts horse or David Beckham was ostracised in England or even 2007 where (by his own admission) Wayne Barnes choked and the vitriol was definitely pointed at him.
As you say - its the system. And I think fewer people care. Which is probably healthy.
Anyone seen any news on Lockie Fergusson's injury? Last I saw he was due for a scan?
"You've turned the game into a crime scene" absolutely bang on from Scotty J.
https://youtu.be/9CxPgXLwVms?si=CCqKOKu0x22xwcQd