The sporting weekend with something for everyone
High drama in Super Rugby, in the CWC, in F1, in AFL - not so much the Warriors.
Despite the stop-start and generally shambolic nature of Super Rugby Pacific, it managed to throw up a genuinely fascinating weekend of footy.
From the imaginative camera angles to try to trick up crowds - the Otago student body hasn't had this much coverage since the ’09 Undie 500 riots - to golden point victories and another Chiefs-Crusaders classic, Super Rugby had something for everyone.
It also had another knock to Beauden Barrett’s head after he collided with the Highlanders’ Fetuli Paea.
Barrett looked sharp in his return for the Blues but his health is going to come under increased scrutiny after he conceded that he contemplated retirement when he struggled to shake off the effects of a concussion suffered last year.
While it’s an awkward connection, it probably helps that Barrett is coached by Leon MacDonald, a man who was forced to retire after a string of concussions, and who had to read in the paper about how worried his mother was for his health.
As it was, MacDonald’s comments post game were simple and direct: “We’re never going to take any chances with Beauden. We want to look after his health and make sure he’s well, and it was an automatic decision [to take him off] really.”
Count me as one of Barrett’s biggest fans; count me also as someone who doesn’t mind if we don’t see him again for a wee while.
While Barrett was the feel-bad story of the weekend, Moana Pasifika provided all the feels on Friday. Although the Hurricanes have been dormant for too long, few gave Moana a chance of beating the capital city franchise.
If you’re going to win your first game, then doing it by coming from behind to force extra time, then kick-chasing from deep in your own half to score via a former Hurricane, Danny Toala, is probably the way you’d script it.
“[It’s] something that I’ve probably never felt before. Surreal. I don’t know. Playing for my family, it just hits different. It’s surreal, I’m speechless,” Toala said, before finding the power of speech to entertainingly talk through his try.
“I thought of running it but then something told me just to kick it. Kicked it and then first it didn’t bounce up nicely so I hacked it with my shin and then even the bounce before I picked it up to score wasn’t as nice as well… I actually thought it would have gone up to the TMO because it looks pretty dodgy.”
The Crusaders put on the most ominous display. It was only the grit, timely brilliance of Alex Nankivell and some mystical property that refuses to let games between these two teams become dull that kept the score somewhat close.
The Crusaders look primed.
The less said about the Warriors match against the Wests Tigers the better, so here goes. The Warriors won 16-12 in their worst performance of the season. Horrendous spectacle. Take the two points, move on and never speak of this game again.
There would have been a few ICC officials with their heads in their hands as the dreaded DRS indicated Deepti Sharma, India’s off spinner, had overstepped on the penultimate ball of the final round-robin match of the women’s World Cup, effectively handing South Africa victory and conspiring her side fifth.
An India-less semifinals means millions upon millions less eyeballs and, well, you should know how the money-go-round works by now.
There were several lessons in this single act, as Mignon du Preez holed out to long-on and instead of walking disconsolately from the ground, found herself back at the non-striker’s end with her team needing two from two.
First, don’t bowl no balls, especially if they’re near the end of the match in a game of razor-thin margins.
Two, don’t tell the batter to “f*** off”. It’s crap behaviour without a no ball; it’s really, really embarrassing with one.
Three, why did the run not count to long-on even if the catch is taken? The ball is hit, the run is taken, it can’t be out so why scratch it off?
Four, the error made one team’s night, and it wasn’t necessarily South Africa, who had already qualified.
The thriller was a continuation of what has been a superb tournament.
It’s just a crying shame that the White Ferns won’t be part of the semifinals. It was incredible that the very first match, the one that New Zealand lost to the West Indies when chasing six off the last over with three wickets in hand, would still be haunting the team until the final ball of round robin play.
Australia meet the West Indies in Wellington on Wednesday, with England and South Africa playing a day later in Christchurch.
The most anarchic scenes of the sporting weekend occurred at Sydney, where the crowd invaded the pitch after Swans forward Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin kicked his 1000th AFL goal.
During the week AFL bosses said they were “prepared” for a pitch invasion, effectively endorsing the pile on. It was hectic, slightly dangerous and a bit special all at once.
Franklin is just the sixth player to reach the milestone behind Tony Lockett (1360), Gordon Coventry (1299), Jason Dunstall (1254), Doug Wade (1057) and Gary Ablett Sr (1031).
Adding extra frisson to the occasion is the belief that Franklin will be the last person to achieve the feat.
Not only is no other current player within cooee of four figures but the defensive side of the game has become far more sophisticated in recent years.
“There is no one playing the game at the moment that will get remotely near Buddy’s 1000,” Dunstall told CODE ($). “The way the game looks at the moment, nobody will touch it.”
If you like AFL, you’ll lap up this data-journalism piece by the ABC on Franklin. Even if you don’t, you’ll find a couple of nuggets, like Ted Potter, who played 182 games for Collingwood in the ’60s and ’70s without kicking a single goal. That’s my kind of hero.
The Guardian is a go-to website for world news, especially if your political persuasion tends towards the liberal end of the spectrum. The sports section has always been seen as perhaps a little bit worthy and wordy - sports fans, as a whole, do not always require context - but they had one of those days yesterday when every column seemed to hit the mark.
Well, my mark at least.
For example, I sometimes struggle to explain the concept of ‘sportswashing’, other than to say it’s the use of big sports events by unsavoury regimes to wield as soft power.
I know that just as Formula One should not be in Russia, it sure as hell shouldn’t have been in Saudi Arabia either (and that was well before a missile fired by Houthi rebels struck an oil facility near the Jeddah circuit the day before qualifying). But if you want more nuance than that broad brush, let me point you in the direction of this excellent Giles Richard piece.
The harsh truth of the Saudi-led coalition’s war with the [Houthi] rebels burst F1’s bubble of belief that they operate in a vacuum where sport and politics simply do not mix… Saudi Arabia talks of hosting the race with the “hope of changing perceptions,” in itself an admission of how badly it needs to transform its deservedly grotesque image.
Human Rights Watch has reported that in its seven-year war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has “a sordid record of unlawful attacks, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in areas held by the Houthi armed group”. Let it be noted that F1 acted with unprecedented speed to cancel the Russian GP within hours of their invasion of Ukraine yet has not batted an eyelid to what is happening in Yemen.
No person has manipulated the levers of soft power more shamelessly than our old friend Vladimir Putin and why wouldn’t you if you can get the IOC and Fifa (why do those two organisations always have to take the wretched road?) to prostrate themselves shamefully in front of you.
Sporting isolation will hurt Russian and hurt Vlad, but Jonathan Wilson digs a little deeper to show why it will also hasten the decay and downfall of the country’s football programme.
Although all four FA Cup quarter-finals, the Clásico and the Superclásico could all be watched last weekend, the Premier League and Ligue 1 are no longer broadcast in Russia. It’s largely symbolic, but it only enhances a sense of isolation – and isolation in football, even before globalisation, has only ever led to regression. Argentina emerged from a decade of Peronist isolation to lose 6-1 to Czechoslovakia at the 1958 World Cup; even six years out of European competition post-Heysel set English football back significantly…
In Russia there is a curious sense of suspension. There are no games for the national side this week but the league ticks on. The crash, though, is coming. Compared to what is happening in Ukraine, of course, that is an irrelevance, but football, as the most global of sports, perhaps serves as a case study for other aspects of Russian life. And the reality is that for now, and the immediate future, Russian football is over.
The final part of the Guardian trilogy worth reading is Tim de Lisle’s scathing assessment of the England cricket captain Joe Root’s leadership credentials. It’s a piece brought into sharp relief by England’s crushing 10-wicket loss in the third test against the West Indies in Granada this morning - a loss that condemns them to a 0-1 series loss to one of world cricket’s test-match strugglers.
In Grenada, it’s been glaringly obvious that Root has failed to fix one of his team’s biggest flaws: his own captaincy. On the third morning he ran through his full repertoire of howlers…
Joe Root, world-class batsman, has one great misfortune: he has to play under Joe Root, third-class captain. He’s a timid selector, a hopeless reader of a pitch and a terrible tactician.
Tell us what you really feel, Tim.
It is a curious phenomenon of cricket that by default the captaincy tends to go to the best batter, regardless of leadership credentials.
It would have been fascinating to see Tim Southee captain the Black Caps across a test series. Casting aside all jokes about the bravery of his batting, he’s developed a big cricket brain and he’s a genuine leader. As is tradition, however, when Kane Williamson is unavailable, the baton passes to the next most accomplished batter, Tom Latham, who has shown himself to be a steady, if somewhat unimaginative, skipper.
It was a poignant portrait of modern cricket that the West Indies should beat England with a team of honest triers while 14,000km away in India the Next Big Thing in Caribbean cricket, Odeon Smith, was winning a T20 match for the Punjab Kings.
To return reluctantly to Jeddah, the Saudi Arabia GP was really good, with a pistols-at-evening duel between Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, who finished second in his Ferrari, a taste of the season to come at more appealing venues.
The real drama occurred in qualifying, however, when Mick Schumacher, son of Michael, put his Haas car into the wall at 270kph. He was saved by the fact his car spun just enough that the side of the car took most of the impact because no open-wheel car, no matter how well constructed, was built to drive head-on into concrete at that speed.
The next time they race is at Melbourne in two weeks, a weekend that will also feature the Supercars, where in Tasmania this weekend Kiwi Shane van Gisbergen put on the sort of masterful display across three races that gives weight to the claims he is one of the best all-round drivers on four wheels in the world.
THIS WEEK
It was such an epic weekend of sport that there are still areas unexplored, like World Cup qualifying for example, so look out for a short newsletter tomorrow, the normal Wednesday midweek goodness and we’ll play it by ear from there.
