Thoughts from a hot-and-cold SR final
PLUS: Black Ferns on the rise; swimming takes the lead in the transgender debate; and a breakthrough major win at Brookline.
Despite having no dog in the Super Rugby title fight, it still left me with a headful of mixed emotions.
It took 24 hours and a partial second watch to work out what they were, but they can be summed up simply with:
Admiration for the Crusaders’ surgical-like performance;
Disappointment at the Blues flop.
There is nothing revelatory or insightful about that, but it surprised me how quickly the second emotion overrode the first - about five minutes into the second half as the most one-sided 21-7 result imaginable played out.
I was thoroughly enjoying the match, then suddenly I wasn’t and it had nothing to do with who was winning and losing; rather it had everything to do with one team playing and another that was not even in the picture.
Immediately post-match is never a time to gain great wisdom but Beauden Barrett’s on-field interview was at least instructive.
To paraphrase: We didn’t fire a shot in the first half; we didn’t really fire a shot in the second either.
True.
Beauden, who was by some distance the least effective Barrett on Eden Park, was not high on the list of problems, those mainly were housed in jerseys 1 to 8, but he wasn’t part of the solution either.
On replay I searched for instances where he might have sprinkled a bit of stardust on proceedings and they were few and far between. There were a couple of times when he shovelled the ball on where he might have played closer to the line and backed himself. If you were being cruel you could say he continued to try to “game manage” when there was no game left to manage, but even Marvel Comics would not have been able to dream up a superpower that would have repelled the swarming army in red and black.
Put it this way, the Blues were never going to win with the best of Beauden being a spot tackle on his own line to save a try.
There were a number of reasons the Crusaders won.
They destroyed the Blues lineout so completely that Leon MacDonald pondered whether the Crusaders had hacked their iPads.
“They got up well. It was like they had our playbook there. They were reading our play and causing a lot of trouble there.”
Scott Barrett said the 10 steals off the hapless Kurt Eklund’s throws were due to bone-deep planning, including sacrificing a free day.
“We put a lot of time into it, meeting on a day off, throwing out ideas with [lock] Quinten Strange, Jason Ryan behind the scenes. We put a lot of work into it, and got the reward tonight, which was pleasing,” Barrett said.
You can compensate for a faltering lineout with some tactical modifications - most obviously keeping the ball in play - but that only works if your scrum is high functioning and you’re getting at the very least parity at the breakdown.
Neither happened, with the Crusaders engine room dominant throughout.
It’d be nice to report on a Super Rugby final without All Black implications but it is worth pointing out that the Blues have six forwards in Ian Foster’s squad for the Ireland series, two more than the Crusaders.
It wasn’t just the forwards, however. After a so-so season, Richie Mo’unga was excellent when it counted.
In greasy conditions the Crusaders handled expertly and put the ball into the right areas. The Blues seemed to be stuck permanently on “exit strategy” football. The Crusaders didn’t just have Beauden covered, but rendered the Blues vaunted midfield of Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Rieko Ioane so ineffective you barely noticed the former being replaced just after halftime.
In contrast, David Havili was the best back on the park. Second five-eighth is one of the most complicated positions in all of sport. To play it well you must combine power and precision. You have to handle exceptionally, kick accurately and tackle everything. Havili wobbled when tasked with that in the All Blacks. On the weekend he was exceptional.
Which seems like the ideal time to mention that what Scott Robertson is doing is remarkable, even accounting for the Covid disruptions over the past three seasons that have considerably weakened the field.
Six trophies in six seasons, the only blemish being the slightly Mickey Mouse transtasman comp tacked on to the end of the last Super season.
If you want to call Robertson the best coach in world rugby at the moment, you won’t find a lot of arguments at The Bounce. Don’t get any ideas though, Andy…
Modern rugby is all about the big squeeze and finding pressure points: nobody does that better than the Crusaders, who by their own admission didn’t set the world on fire this season until they needed to.
That led to some thinking that MacDonald might have surpassed Robertson in line to the throne, a notion that should be put to rest now.
“In the off-season, Razor gets his mind to work and it’s a beautiful mind,” said the title-winning Barrett brother. “I’m sure he’ll be thinking up plans for next season and how we can get better.”
There’s always a risk of going overboard when talking of transformational change, especially given the relative strength of opposition, but it seems like Wayne Smith is presiding over an improving, happy, deeper Black Ferns team than we saw on the ill-fated northern tour last year.
The 50-6 win in Whangarei was achieved by playing attacking rugby in dreadful conditions. It’s unlikely to have England and France, the current standard bearers of women’s rugby, quaking in their boots, but they might be just starting to glance over their shoulder.
There is not a lot of time until the World Cup starts in October, but there are more tests to come against Australia in August.
This is big, with swimming’s governing body banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s events unless they have transitioned before the age of 12.
“This is not saying that people are encouraged to transition by the age of 12. It’s what the scientists are saying, that if you transition after the start of puberty, you have an advantage, which is unfair,” James Pearce, who is the spokesperson for FINA president Husain Al-Musallam, told The Associated Press.
“They’re not saying everyone should transition by age 11, that’s ridiculous. You can’t transition by that age in most countries and hopefully you wouldn’t be encouraged to. Basically, what they’re saying is that it is not feasible for people who have transitioned to compete without having an advantage.”
If Twitter is anything to go by, and it often isn’t, then the news has been met with a sense of relief; a general feeling that common sense has been arrived at.
The challenge now is almost the flipside of what observers have been wrestling with.
Where we’ve been asking how you make sport fair as well as inclusive, the challenge now they’ve moved towards a “fairer” solution is to make it just as inclusive.
That could expedite the formation of an “open” category.
There was a simple yet beautifully evocative moment on the 18th green at the US Open this morning when Englishman Matt Fitzpatrick won his first major.
As Will Zalatoris’ putt slid by the left edge, Fitzpatrick remained impassive, classily realising that his playing partner still had a short putt to make to hold on to second.
His caddie Billy Foster couldn’t hide his emotion. Into his fourth decade of caddying for the likes of Lee Westwood, Seve Ballasteros, Sergio Garcia, Thomas Bjorn, Darren Clarke and, briefly, Tiger Woods, Foster still hadn’t bagged a major and the realisation of a dream clearly meant something to him.
Fitzpatrick quietly shuffled over and put an arm around him and said something they both found funny.
It wasn’t ostentatious or over the top. There was no whooping or uncontrollable waterworks.
It was perfect.
Mark Schlabach nicely rounds up the key moments of the Brookline major, none of which involve New Zealanders after Ryan Fox and Danny Lee missed the cut.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, Lydia Ko finished within a shot of the leaders after carding a four-under final round.
It brought up a milestone that points to her astonishing consistency - 100 top 10 finishes on the LPGA Tour.
THIS WEEK
I had some interesting correspondence from Sally, a subscriber who came in on the ground floor, about the lack of diversity in rugby’s coaching and commentary boxes that deserves a response. She raises an interesting point in a non-confrontational way.
That will likely come on Wednesday, along with a BYC podcast previewing the dead-rubber test (didn’t think I’d be writing that until a few days ago) between the Black Caps and England at Headingley that starts on Thursday night.
The first ‘Notes From Headingley’ will be folded into the Friday newsletter - the inaugural Matariki Edition - and at this stage I cannot guarantee a Sunday edition as I’m attending a 50th at Mt Maunganui and we all know how wild and crazy things can get when a bunch of youngsters get on the pre-mixed voddies at The Mount.
Beautiful golfing moment!
As a One eyed chiefs supporter it pains me to say but the crusaders were clinical, efficient and a scary step ahead. Based on the blues forward performance (and some of the backs) they must be glad the ABs team had already been announced. To see the blues scrum demolished in the 2nd half when they had ABs props does not instill confidence against Ireland. Maybe once Wayne Smith has sorted out the black ferns he'll come back and sort out the All blacks.