What exactly do we watch sports for?

A City question, plus the best of the Waitangi weekend links

City - so good they make their own rules. Photo/ Action Plus (via Photosport)

It’s never a good idea to start anything with a question, especially in the headline, if you don’t intend to answer it, but think of this not so much as a cop out, but as an invitation to think.

Why do you watch sports?

Is it mindless escapism?

(I don’t want to make any assumptions but I’m guessing that if you’re subscribed to a sports newsletter - thanks! - you’re probably more mindful than mindless when it comes to sport.)

Is it for the aesthetic; the wonders of the human body and athleticism?

Is it to gamble?

Is it that kinship you feel with people who support the same teams? 

Is it the realisation that what you’ll see next is unscripted and could well be wondrous?

Or is it just to watch your team win?

I started thinking about all that when I read the news about the Premier League charging Manchester City with 101 breaches of competition rules.

This is not some frivolous game of Gotcha! It sounds serious.

Says The Guardian:

There has never been anything like this in English football. In the 13 seasons covered by the various charges, starting in 2009-10, City have won the Premier League and League Cup six times and the FA Cup twice. They have played in the Champions League each season starting with 2011-12. They, as much as any other club, have been behind the growing global success of the Premier League and the increasingly lavish spending on players (City’s squad is estimated to be worth £1b). The effects of this have… affected competitive balance at home and across Europe, led to the development of a breakaway Super League (of which City were part) and hastened the need for independent regulation of the English game. Last week, the president of Spain’s La Liga, Javier Tebas, called the English top flight a “doped market”. If City are judged to have found success while breaking the rules, the game will come under greater scrutiny.

I know some Manchester City fans. On the whole, their table manners are fine, but I began to wonder how I’d feel if I was wearing their Kevin de Bruyne pyjamas right now.  

Would I feel angry and victimised by the Premier League? Would I feel cheated that having lived through the bad years - they were in League One, the old third division, not much more than 20 years ago - that the good years are now being impugned?

Would it matter to me that this awesome piece of sky-blue machinery, that can plug in and play superstars from around the globe and rarely skip a beat, was greased and oiled by dodgy deals and creative accounting?

Would the threat of relegation, of transfer freezes, or even having titles rescinded, keep me awake at night?

Reagan Shekov @RShekov

Premier League champions if Manchester City didn't cheat their way to the top.

Perhaps it just comes down to what you watch sport for.

The main reason I started watching games as a kid and haven’t been able to take my eyes off them since is that you just don’t know what is going to happen next; that there’s always a chance that a miracle could happen.

One of the reasons doping and particularly match-fixing offends me so greatly is because it messes with that premise.

Is financial doping, which potentially tilts the field so steeply in one direction, really any different?

So many questions and so few answers. I can say with some certainty, however, that Manchester City v the Premier League is shaping as the biggest global off-field story of the year.

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Speaking of obscene volumes of money, the DP World Tour v LIV Golf hearing is fairly significant too.

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The Telegraph ($) in London broke the news this morning that Chelsea has hired mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka. It was followed up widely, with an emphasis placed on his role in establishing a “no dickheads” policy that has been at least partially credited for the All Blacks finally getting over the expectation hump and winning  world cups in 2011 and 2015.

In 2017 he explained the concept.

“A dickhead makes everything about them. Often teams put up with it because a player has so much talent. We look for early warning signs and wean the big egos out pretty quickly. Our motto is, ‘If you can't change the people, change the people’...

“Look for people putting themselves ahead of the team. Or people who think they’re entitled to things or expect the rules to be different for them. People operating deceitfully in the dark, or alternatively, being unnecessarily loud about their work.”

Subtext: jump on any type of individualism and either thrash it out of them or ditch them.

This sort of conformity works well within rugby’s heavily codified culture and, indeed, suits the New Zealand male ideal of being a humble, hardworking teammate - a good bugger, an average-sized poppy.

It will be intriguing to see how it works in a sport where superstar culture is so heavily embedded, and within a squad that has just spent £600 million in a bid to be the best.

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Gregor Paul added some new details around the imminent appointment of the next All Blacks coach ($). More interesting, however, was his not-so-veiled pop at the reasons for doing so.

…the determination [has] been made that an early process will mitigate against candidates being picked off by other international sides as happened in 2019.

But while [this argument] made sense even as recently as [November, it doesn’t] stand up to scrutiny now that England, Australia and Wales fired their coaches.

All three nations were forced, by underperformance, to address their coaching situations and once they made the decision to fire their incumbents nine months before the World Cup, they had to offer long-term contracts to secure replacements…

A few months ago the prospect of losing [Scott] Robertson to a rival nation was real, but not now – there simply isn’t anywhere for him to go - and so, again, the rationale that NZR is battling market forces and under pressure to make an early decision about its next All Blacks coach doesn’t have any evidential basis.

This is no doubt true and while NZR’s rationale might be flimsy, I’m at least going to give them bonus points for reading-the-room.

The largest, most valuable sporting organisation in the country has reams of data measuring engagement and the suspicion is that plenty of key numbers are trending down. The All Blacks are the key driver of engagement and they haven’t been an easy team to embrace in the Ian Foster era.

While giving a fatigued and possibly apathetic rugby public the promise of change might not be fair on the incumbent coach, it does make some sense.

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Sean Marks tenure at the Brooklyn Nets has been far from dull. In the past few days he’s traded away Kyrie Irving, a man regarded as one of the greatest point guards to ever lace them up and “the worst teammate of all time”, which is official because Tony Kornheiser said it.

Marks, or someone pretending to be Marks, posted this. Deep.

Sean Marks @SeanMarksNetsGM

“Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future.” – Daphne Rose Kingma

Mount Maunganui is calling (drop in for a chat)

The Bounce will be at Bay Oval for the first test starting next Thursday and I figure that is as good a place as any to trial a tool that I have been toying with using but haven’t yet found the right occasion - Substack chat. To join the chat, you’ll need to download the ridiculously user-friendly app.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to read something into the selection of Will Young in the New Zealand XI to play England in Hamilton this week.

Remember last week when I lamented the handling of Ajaz Patel’s stop-start-stopped international career? Well, if there’s one player who has come as close to being as badly mishandled, it’s his Central Districts teammate Young.

I’ve written about this before so I’m not going to bore you again but trying to reshape a talented strokemaker into an opener to plug a gap was as dumb as it was shortsighted, and Young has every right to feel disillusioned as to what it is the selectors want from him in each of the formats.

As silly and meaningless as these warm-up games tend to be, Young’s place in the batting order could be instructive as to where they see Young’s future in red- (and pink-) ball cricket. If he’s No3 or below, he’s pretty much fighting with Henry Nicholls and Daryl Mitchell for a spot; if he’s opening… well, we might as well all pack up and go home.

Kyle Jamieson is also getting a run at Seddon Park in a bid to get more overs into his legs and confirm his back will stand up to the rigours of international cricket. My understanding is he will only be considered for the second test at the Basin Reserve, clearing the way for Matt Henry to play at Mt Maunganui, where he has yet to play a test. 

With Henry and Nicholls set to play that first test (much to the chagrin of some of my regular correspondents) it is worth pointing out that they have been effective in home conditions, and that description is selling Nicholls short.

The Canterbury southpaw is a beast on home turf.

That 48.02 is a world-class average (21.66 away from home is not) and if you look at his strike rate at home, 53.99, it is clear he finds every aspect of batting easier on the green fields of EnZed. 

There was a bunch of feedback to my inbox and on the comments from the Ajaz piece. I’ve read most of it, but haven’t got back to everyone yet. Thanks though, and I may address some of the best stuff in my next newsletter.

After an underwhelming summer of cricket, you can start to smell the linseed oil in the air again.

Can’t wait.