This is absolutely not a headline to say the Warriors are title contenders
More Super Rugby wash up, a splash of golf and an ugly score in the AFL
We’re surely only a couple of Warriors’ wins away from a bevy of stories with headlines like:
“The seven big changes Webster has made to turn the Warriors around”;
“From pretenders to contenders: how Webster has created a winning environment”;
“Revealed: the secret reason behind the Warriors surge”.
Maybe they’ve already been written and I have subconsciously avoided them, but it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the idea that there’s something a bit special happening in the heart of Auckland’s industrial triangle.
Friday’s 48-18 romp against St George was impressive, but there was a counterintuitive reason why I particularly enjoyed it.
The first-half errors.
In the early rounds, it was clear Andrew Webster was focusing on injecting more defensive discipline into the club and was melding that to a ultra-conservative attacking game plan. It’s easier to get into good defensive habits when you’re completing your sets and giving the defence a rest.
It was sensible - and a little bit boring.
In recent weeks the game plan has expanded markedly, helped immeasurably by Shaun Johnson’s renewed confidence in taking on the line. The second-phase and second-man plays seem more intuitive and the passing sharper and hitting players in stride.
Playing more expansively invariably leads to more errors but this is what I loved about Friday: the errors came thick and fast early. In some cases they were costly - one poorly executed dummy run ruled out a Warriors try and one dropped ball led directly to a Dragons score - and if it had happened in round two, I reckon the call would have come to shut up shop and to start to work their way methodically through risk-free sets.
That fact they kept their foot down tells me that the Warriors now understand they’re better than most of the teams they play against. Not in a cocky way, but in a “this is what we’re about and you’ve got to try to live with us” way.
That’s why I reckon Webster was half bluffing in this story.
“I thought our attack was really clinical at times, I also thought we overdid it at times too. We put 48 points on them and everyone’s going to say, ‘Are you kidding yourself?’ I thought there were moments where we were trying to be too cute and overplay, but I was also happy with our execution at times.”
As a pointer to his mindset, in the same interview he noted his favourite part of the game was the Warriors holding out the Dragons in two defensive sets late in the match, as it told him they weren’t satisfied to just win, they had pride in their line too.
I’m refusing to write the headline that they’re genuine contenders yet, but I’m not going to condemn you if you choose to - particularly if the Rabbitohs are brushed aside in front of what will be a bountiful crowd in Penrose on Friday.
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My favourite Warriors story of the weekend came from an unlikely source: The HMS Bounty.
This might be widely known by some but it was definitely news to me that utility Dylan Walker was a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, though I was aware that former Kiwis captain and centre Roy Christian had Pitcairn Island roots.
Walker’s mother Judy was born on Pitcairn Island, which at the 2021 census recorded a population of 47. Pretty much everyone from there is related to Christian or one of the other mutineers who fled to the island.
The legacy of the mutineers is complicated, despite how they are portrayed in popular culture, but according to the story, Walker sees a bit of his ancestors in himself.
Christian was [either] a man who stood up to the barbaric tyranny of [Captain Bligh], or a troublemaker who wouldn’t respect authority. Either way, Walker likes to imagine there’s a bit of his great, great, great, great-grandfather in him.
“I would like to think I am a bit of a rebel, but I couldn’t comprehend what he did,” Walker said.
Sam Cane’s decision, whether it was his or made for him, has not gone down well at Newshub, with Ollie Ritchie making it one of his three hot-button topics from the final. Ritchie’s assessment of Cane’s no-show could be summed up by the fact he used the word “disappointing” four times and “unbecoming” twice in the 20-second clip!
Personally, I was more interested in Jeff Wilson’s half take, half question on The Breakdown, when he posited the idea that the Crusaders success was not great for New Zealand Rugby. The All Blacks were at their best, he noted, when the Crusaders were not winning, and really haven’t been the same since the Christchurch-based franchise has gone on a seven-year winning spree.
It is intriguing, but at the risk of committing the sin of answering a question with two questions, should it even matter? Is it a failing of Super Rugby that we still tend to view it through the prism of All Black success?
To answer my own questions. One, it should not matter. Two, yes.
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Thanks to everyone who hit the comment button or emailed after yesterday’s Sunday Special, which focused on the Crusaders thudding Super Rugby victory. I appreciate the engagement with the newsletter and feel guilty if I don’t reply or acknowledge it in a timely fashion. There were a few things marked on my bingo card from yesterday that I expected some pushback on, but describing Damian McKenzie’s try-cancelling offside as a “technical infringement” was not one of them!
Fair play though.
To be clear, he was definitely offside and that is why I made the point of writing the word ‘correct’ in bold font when I described the TMO’s decision to rub the try out. Technical infringement is an umbrella term I use to describe penalties that are not violent, reckless or cynical, though on reflection it is a clumsy catch-all as it implies shoulders not being square at a scrum engagement rather than being a couple of yards offside.
At a pinch you could describe McKenzie’s actions as a cynical attempt to gain an advantage - many offsides, particularly on defence, are - but why you’d do that on your own ball is less clear.
In my view, it was more likely the move was mistimed, not malign.
Keep the feedback coming. Love it.
TVNZ picked up on the abuse referee Ben O’Keeffe was receiving on his Instagram page. In a move I don’t fully understand, they gave the abusers anonymity, even though they were happy to post some fairly dreadful thoughts on a very public post.
Lydia Ko made the cut on the line but finished well back in the PGA Championship at Baltusrol, won by China’s 20-year-old Yin Ruoning. Ko’s final-round even par left her at +6 for the championship and in a tie for 57th. It is a decent representation of where Ko’s golf is at the moment. Speaking to a professional coach recently, he was somewhat pessimistic about Ko’s chances of competing at major championships in the future, saying the explosion in women’s golf has seen players get younger and, most importantly, longer. He did say, however, there were certain courses that set up well for Ko. Let’s hope one of them is the famous Pebble Beach links at the US Open in two weeks.
Meanwhile, it was a lucrative week for Daniel Hillier on the DP World Tour. Hillier finished in a four-way tie for third at the BMW International Open in Munich. Hillier has experienced an up-and-down past few months on tour, securing two top fives and three missed cuts. Still, with more than $430,000 in prize money this year, he’s well on the way to establishing himself on the tour.
You can have a down day in the NRL and Super Rugby and have 50 points put on you. It’s embarrassing but you’ll get over it. If you’re a bad team having a bad day in the AFL it can get very, very ugly.
The West Coast Eagles, who have made an impressive seven grand finals in their 36-year existence, winning four flags, were beaten 31.19 to 5.4 by Sydney in the weekend. To use the scoring most of us will understand, that’s 205-34. How horrendous have the Eagles been? They’ve also lost 174-52 to Adelaide, 142-26 to Hawthorn and 152-44 to Carlton. Most teams will not suffer a single 100-point defeat in a season - to have racked up four already points to a club on the point of implosion.
Once again, Jeff Wilson is confusing correlation with causation.
Granted, for the past 7 years, the Crusaders have been sensational and the AB's have been less so.
Perhaps that's not because the Crusaders being good causes the AB's to be mud or vice versa, perhaps the correlation is because the best coach in the country has been coaching one and not the other?
On the flip side to that, it'll be interesting to see whether Sam Whitelock just sacrificed his All Black season for the Super Rugby final, and what impact that will have on the RWC....
Cheers
I was disappointed in both the crowd reaction and hearing neither Cane or Weber turned up to the press conference. Yep losing sucks but sometimes you have a responsibility you have to fulfill whether you like it or not. Whilst there were some ref decisions I didn't agree with (was Taylors first try legit as they had detached from the maul?) the Chiefs just didn't play good enough to win. You need a full team to beat the crusaders. I agree with Detchon about why that 10m is even a law.