Tuesday mash-up: Pitched battle for the Big Apple
Bit of cricket, bit of rugby, bit of sevens, bit of petrol, bit of McJesus, bit of... slapping!
Plug “can cricket crack America?” or variations thereof into Google and you will not be short of links.
Even Vanity Fair is on the case, under the headline Can Cricket Conquer America?
Last time cricket dominated American sporting culture, cholera was booming, Millard Fillmore was our nation’s most famous person, and trad wives were known, I’m guessing, just as wives.
The story covers many of the usual tropes, while casually mentioning not once but twice that cricket is the second-biggest sport in the world.
(Don’t @ me Sir Hoops-a-lot, I’m just quoting the story.)
It paints an intriguing picture of the possibilities of cricket in the US, beyond the energising of the South Asian diaspora.
The upcoming men’s T20 World Cup might just break international viewership records, and domestic audiences appear suitably intrigued. Tickets to the sold-out match between India and Pakistan on June 9 in New York have been selling on StubHub for upwards of $5000. After a new world champion is crowned a few weeks later in Barbados, many of the game’s top international players—including South Africa’s Faf du Plessis, Pakistan’s Haris Rauf, and Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan—will stick around for season two of Major League Cricket…
If Major League Cricket sounds like a moon shot, however, you’re looking at only half the picture. The league exists thanks to the fanaticism and efforts of 20 big-brained and deep-pocketed investors—a who’s who of business executives, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. These guys are all in. From former CTO of Dropbox Aditya Agarwal to Perot Group chairman Ross Perot Jr, it’s a group you’d be unwise to bet against.
If the long-term aim is to tap into American broadcast and commercial riches, the establishment a professional league in the US would certainly help, and that hope got a massive boost when the USA chased down Canada’s imposing 194-5 in the 18th over of the World T20 opener in Dallas.
Played in front of a great crowd, it was a lot of fun, especially when New York-born, Barbados-raised Aaron Jones started hitting every second ball he saw out of the stadium. Jones is one of three players in the XI born in the USA, including opener Steven Taylor and medium-pacer Jasdeep Singh. There are two South Africans, three Indians, a Pakistani, a Canadian and our own Corey Anderson. It’s a real melting pot, which is not a bad microcosm of American metropolitan life.
Unfortunately, the second match on American soil - the tournament is shared between three venues in the US and six in the Caribbean - did not go so well.
The organisers and New York itself has been lauded for coming up with an impressive venue in what was a race against the clock. This link has a great time lapse video of Nassau County International Cricket Stadium being constructed out of a blank green canvas at Eisenhower Park, but the drop-in pitch used for this morning’s match between Sri Lanka, who were all out for 77 in the 20th over, and South Africa was below substandard.
It’s such a shame. The logistics involved in creating the wickets in Adelaide, shipping them in trays to Savannah, Georgia, transporting them to Florida for winter before trucking them north to New York has been immense.
This confidence expressed in this tract from The Cricket Monthly story linked above now seems misplaced.
Both [Adelaide Oval curator Damian] Hough and [the ICC’s Don] Lockerbie heaved a sigh of relief when the pitches were put in place at Eisenhower Park. “This was the biggest fear I had for the entire project,” Lockerbie said. “Because if that project failed - moving the wickets to New York and putting them in - then I might as well not finish the stadium, because you can’t play on bad wickets.”
Without massive improvement, the games in New York, especially the feature match between India and Pakistan next week, will be a total flop.
Can cricket crack America?
Maybe not, but a few decent games in the Big Apple would help.
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It’s hard to think of a lower-key build-up to a world event than what the Black Caps have undertaken for this one. A lot hinges on their opening match this weekend against Afghanistan, who have the benefit of a match on the Providence ground, a crushing 125-run defeat of Uganda.
The BYC had a soft re-launch last week, but Paul Ford and I will dig into the team’s prospects in more depth on tomorrow’s pod, which should be available for some evening listening, or cue it up for your commute on Thursday.
The Bounce is proud to introduce K3 Legal as a partner for 2024. Click on the link to learn more about their legal services.
It seems about right that in a year where it felt like Super Rugby provided an upswing in terms of quality and action, the major story, sometimes it feels like the only story, is the massive downswing of its most successful franchise.
Part of that is the immutable laws of human nature - a mix of schadenfreude and, at a more innocent level, the desire to see hegemony challenged.
Part of it is timing and structure - with such a ‘generous’ playoff system and three more weeks of rugby to come, there is no obvious success to celebrate yet, so failure is instead under the microscope.
Part of it is genuine newsworthiness - the Crusaders have made such a pig’s ear of post-Razor life it would be naive to think it wouldn’t be scrutinised to the nth degree.
Crusaders CEO Colin Mansbridge has proven adept at keeping himself in the headlines over the past few weeks as does so again with the news he has commissioned a review into the season and will make a decision on coach Rob Penney’s future at the conclusion of that.
One News’ Patrick McKendry had this timely nugget:
Several senior players were dissatisfied with Penney’s performance, including his selection inconsistency…
When asked about selection grumbles, [Mansbridge] said: “Players have expressed frustration… It’s not unknown. Every year we’ve had frustration with selections and sometimes from senior players.”
Radio NZ checklisted the Crusaders’ issues, which included player and coaching turnover, injuries, a baffling pre-season tour to the northern hemisphere, poor selections, identity issues and woeful goal kicking.
To that menu I would add recruitment, which is only going to get harder now they’re no longer the gold-standard. Coaching wasn’t specifically mentioned but it cuts across a number of those categories.
Going against the grain, the Herald’s Phil Gifford has pushed for Penney to be retained. He doesn’t make an entirely convincing case it has to be said, leaning heavily on the turnover and injuries caveats before pivoting to this:
Teams in which players have lost all faith in the coach don’t improve late in the season. The 2024 Crusaders did. There needs to be an exhaustive review but the verdict should be to stick with Penney.
That appears to be a tenuous rope to cling to. Teams can improve under poor coaching, particularly when senior players take control.
Penney has been unkindly referred to as a placeholder appointment while assistant Tamati Ellison was readied to take over in 2026. The Crusaders board has three choices: stick to that plan; expedite Ellison’s ascension; or move in a different direction entirely.
As much as Crusaders’ fans might wish upon the third option, it is the most expensive. That might prove Penney and co’s biggest saving grace; not some fragile late-season improvement.
We’re a motorsport nation and might as well just accept it.
It was a huge weekend for fans of four-wheeled sport, with Scott Dixon putting on a strategy-assisted masterclass to win in the shadows of General Motors HQ in Detroit, with countryman Marcus Armstrong securing his first IndyCar podium in finishing third.
Said Dixon: “There’s just always the variable of trying to stay out of trouble and keeping the car on-track. We had rain. It was all over the place. You’re just never really sure how the conditions are going to fall or the strategy.”
Dixon turns 44 next month and is numbers hunting from here on in. He’s taken the lead in the driver standings and if he can hold that he will tie the legendary AJ Foyt’s record of seven. Twinkling in the distance, as well, is Foyt’s record of 67 race wins.
Dixon, on 58 now, said this in 2018, when his win number stood at 44.
“I think AJ is pretty safe,” he said. “He’s a long way ahead.”
With such a young, hungry field he might still be, but another race win or two before the end of this season and you might see his Chip Ganassi team doing the maths and wondering if they could stretch out his career long enough to overhaul what has long been viewed as an impassable record.
To cap off a big weekend Stateside, in Portland Shane van Gisbergen won his first race in the Xfinity Series, surviving a chaotic performance that included a first corner shunt and him twice leaving the track mid-race.
The win came on a road course, which plays into his hands, and it qualifies him for the end-of-season playoffs, though he is the first to admit he’s got Buckley’s chance unless he can find a way to race near the front on ovals.
“I’m a long way from [winning on an oval] and I understand that, but it’s a process, you know. These guys have been doing it since they were kids whereas [road racing] I’ve been doing since I was a kid,” he said.
“So, I have a lot to learn on the ovals, but I’m going to keep getting better and keep focusing. Yeah, one day I want to win on an oval, but I know it’s probably a long way away, but I’m going to keep learning. That’s the next goal.”
If New Zealand is petrolhead heaven at the moment, then Canada remains a defiantly hockey country, even if the Stanley Cup has not resided there since last century.
It has a chance to return north of the order with the Edmonton Oilers beating the Dallas Stars to book a match-up with the Florida Panthers.
The Oilers will be second favourites, but they have Connor McDavid, or McJesus as he’s known in Edmonton. Enjoy the latest exhibit in his case for deification.
I tuned in on time over the weekend to watch the New Zealand sevens teams bow out of the semifinals of the weirdly self-defeating winner-takes-all event in Madrid.
Sevens has done a good job of butchering interest in its events outside of the Olympics, but that is a topic for another day.
Right now, both programmes must feel their chances of Olympic glory is on a knife edge.
The men were outplayed by Argentina, who were subsequently outplayed by France in the final. Throw in Fiji, Ireland and the combined might of Great Britain, and that is one competitive field.
I’m still not quite sure how the women blew their semifinal against Australia, leading by 12 with less than a minute to go. They had at least one golden opportunity to get cynical and slow down Australia’s attack at 19-7 up, which might have resulted in a couple of penalties and a card, but would have left no time on the clock for the fateful restart at 19-14.
We should be thankful that level of gamesmanship hasn’t crept into sevens yet, but if it’s the difference between potential gold and playing off for bronze…
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I was late to this and should have pointed to this last week, but Rikki Swannell makes a lot of sense in this Rugby Pass column.
In the final match of the Pac Four, in what was New Zealand’s last of just three home tests this season, a crowd of 7300 was seen as cause for celebration as the Black Ferns blitzed the Wallaroos at North Harbour Stadium…
While that 7300 is a vast improvement on the horrendous attendance figures of last year’s WXV, it is a long way from the 45,000 who were at the Rugby World Cup final two years ago. That was a special occasion for sure, but somewhere since then the metaphorical ball has been dropped.
Swannell lists a number of theories of reasons for the metaphorical ball-dropping, including a poor fan/ stadium experience, a resurgent rugby league scene that contrasts to poor promotion for union, before finishing with this grim picture:
For a country that considers itself a leader in the world of rugby, we’re now so far behind England and France when it comes to attendance and promotion of the women’s game, that we can’t even see how far we’ve fallen.
It is a morbid interest, but ever since I have been covering the spectre of contact sport and CTE, I’ve also wondered about the link with Motor Neurone Disease. Indeed, a 2022 study at the University of Glasgow concluded a group of former Scottish international rugby players were 15 times more likely to develop MND than the general population.
The former Leeds Rhino dynamo halfback Rob Burrow died over the weekend. As with any untimely death it’s a heartbreaking tragedy, but there was a silver lining to this one. In his final years, Burrow’s story became Kevin Sinfield’s story, too.
Burrow’s former teammate kept pushing the boundaries of physical endurance to raise money for MND research, at one point running seven in seven days in seven different cities. He made each one 27 miles instead of 26, to show everybody they could go the extra mile for a friend.
It was a story of mateship and a hell of a yarn at that ($).
They ended up producing a children’s book to capture the essence of [their] relationship. With You Every Step, it is called, with a series of illustrations documenting a loyalty unlike any other. No matter how extreme Sinfield’s endeavour, Burrow promised that he would have done the same for him. You never doubted it.
Sinfield reflected how he wanted his experiences to be brutal, how he was desperate to push through even the barriers he had known in rugby league. Only this way, he rationalised, could he feel involved in the pursuit of a greater good. The raw numbers were humbling, with the pair raising over £13 million together for MND charities. But it is their sheer commitment to one another that leaves the most lasting impact. Brothers in arms: it is a term, as we saw on that unforgettable day in Leeds, that could have been invented for them.
This is a long story, a bit too long, about one of the fastest growing sports in the world - slap fighting. The ‘sport’ is quite complicated (no, it’s really not). You stand at a table and slap your opponent in the face. If they’re still standing, they get to slap you. The only rules are the slapper can’t lift his feet during the slap or follow through, and they have to strike open-handed and make contact with the cheek. The slappee cannot flinch, or they get, you probably guessed this bit, another slap. That’s it.
We see the hand approaching the face and then the impact. BAM! Phillips’s face is briefly displaced off his skull, his neck skin stretching, his face in this moment deformed like a rubber mask—that’s how unlike a face it looks!—and then suddenly it snaps back on. And in that extended instant we see the light going out. His face is almost peaceful as he falls in the aftermath of such a sudden blast of pain.
CTE and slap fighting. Is that a bit of an unfortunate juxtaposition?
Very interesting article about rapid stadium erection. Can this lot just whack up a 15,000 seater rectangle number in the tank farm and everyone’s a winner?