When 400 is not enough
The Bounce has a narrow focus after the weekend’s follies, played out away from the madding crowd.
It’s like a scenario from one of those decision-based games for children:
You score 400 and lose to a team that scores half that many runs.
Do you: a) laugh, b) cry, c) get your head down and go again?
As grown adults, they have little choice but to take option C, though the Black Caps brains trust must have spent a bunch of time since the early hours of Sunday morning contemplating A and B.
An old teammate of mine described Duckworth-Lewis as like western democracy - it’s not perfect but until someone comes up with a persuasive alternative, it’s the best we’ve got.
On this occasion, it probably failed New Zealand, but then again, so did the bowling attack. Pakistan’s chase was contingent on one extraordinary innings, that of Fakhar Zaman (126* off 81), but I’d still have backed New Zealand to defend that target if the match had played out to its scheduled conclusion. To score 200 in one 25-over block when chasing is phenomenal, to do it again is close to impossible - as in, it’s been done once in the history of ODI cricket kind of impossible.
Even at 200-1 in the midst of the 26th over when the rain finally ruined the match, Cricinfo’s win predictor had New Zealand at 85 percent. That doesn’t seem quite right either, but it is a hell of a lot more accurate, to my mind, than a 21-run DLS loss.
A few notables:
Rachin Ravindra… wow! Have to guiltily confess to being a little underwhelmed by his early forays into international cricket, mostly because his role appeared undefined and his batting could look a little coltish. This is his statement month and the statement is this: “I’m a top-order bat. Anything I might be able to offer with a bit of rudimentary left-arm orthodox is, at this point, a bonus.”
This is all he has done at CWC23: 123* v England, 51 v Netherlands, 9 v Bangladesh, 32 v Afghanistan, 75 v India, 116 v Australia, 9 v South Africa, 108 v Pakistan. He has scored 523 runs at his first ODI World Cup - Williamson scored 578 at the last one and won player of the tournament.
He’s the first New Zealander to score three centuries at a single World Cup, beating Williamson’s two in 2019, Martin Guptill’s two in 2015 and Glenn Turner’s double in 1975. The 23-year-old southpaw has 13 percent of all New Zealand ODI World Cup centuries.
Kane Williamson is pretty good at cricket. Two innings at this World Cup, a 78 retired hurt and that gem of a 95 (79). Both were scored after lay-offs.
What is amazing is how little he seems to care about the sorts of things that drive mere mortals, like milestones. That is his ninth score between 90 and 99 in ODIs, seven of them dismissed and even the 94 not out he scored against India at Eden Park last year saw he and Tom Latham go to elaborate lengths to deny him a century. Williamson was dismissed at Bengaluru trying to hit a six because he knew that puttering along to an inevitable century could cost the team. He was a degree or two short of the necessary elevation to clear long-off.
While it might appear that he is driven by a maniacal desire not to tick off milestones, New Zealand could use a 14th ODI century before this tournament is out. Which brings us to…
That bowling attack that played on Saturday is perhaps the least threatening fielded at this World Cup - by anybody. Admittedly some of it is circumstance, with NZ’s best ODI bowler in recent years, Matt Henry, flying back to Christchurch with a muscle tear, while the fastest bowler, Lockie Ferguson, remains under an injury (and form) cloud, and Kyle Jamieson is undercooked.
The pick of the bowlers against Pakistan was Tim Southee, who is not seen by Gary Stead as a frontline ODI option. Trent Boult is either short of bullets or luck and Ish Sodhi, who should not have bowled after the rain delays against Pakistan, looks like somebody who has spent the past month being biffed around the nets.
If they conjure up a semifinal spot out of these circumstances, good luck playing India with that attack.
New Zealand are the most curious team at this World Cup. It’s impossible to say with any authority whether they’re overachieving, underachieving, desperately unlucky, or sitting about where they deserve to be - albeit by a bizarre and tortuous route.
Their record stands at a neat 50-50 but it rarely seemed if they were that great in getting off to a 4-0 start and it most definitely doesn’t feel like they’ve been that bad in following that up with an 0-4 run.
They put together one complete performance, beating England by nine wickets in the opener at Ahmedabad; and matched that with just one absolute stinker, a 190-run loss to South Africa at Pune.
If offered a must-win final round-robin match against Sri Lanka at the start of the tournament, as a Black Caps’ fan you would probably have taken it, but the prospect of an embarrassing 0-5 slide out the tournament also exists and that would sting1.
Meanwhile, without being alarmist… RAISE THE ALARM!
That’s the forecast for Thursday evening in Bengaluru. Being slap-bang in the middle of a sub-continental landmass, forecasts for that part of the country tend to be frighteningly accurate and you don’t need to be Jim Hickey to tell me that most of the above numbers do not bode well for cricket.
It’s not just the weather in Bengaluru causing twitches. Tonight’s match between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in Delhi is being threatened by air quality.
Both teams had already cancelled one practice session in the build up to Monday’s group-stage match between eliminated Bangladesh and seventh-placed Sri Lanka, who have only the slimmest of chances of reaching the last four.
Air quality remains the main talking point before the game at Arun Jaitley Stadium in New Delhi with the local air quality index (AQI) an alarming 460 on Sunday. An AQI of 0-50 is considered good while anything between 400 and 500 affects healthy people and is considered a danger to those with existing diseases.
Schools in Delhi have been closed until November 10 to avoid exposing children to the ghastly conditions.
Yikes!
The other big EnZed sports talking point of the weekend was crowds, or lack of, at both the WXV in Auckland and the Pacific Nations final between the Kiwis and the Kangaroos in Hamilton.
The latter in particular has been attention grabbing.
Per News Limited:
It was an embarrassing sight for rugby league, and fans slammed New Zealand locals and the tournament schedulers.
One fan wrote on X: “That crowd is abysmal. Where is everyone? And why would they choose to play the final in Hamilton, and not Auckland?”
We’ll ignore the increasingly dangerous practice of sourcing material from the smouldering tyre-fire that is X, nee Twitter, and instead focus on the issue.
While there were obvious problems with marketing and promotions - I talked to a friend from the Waikato region who had no idea the Kiwis were playing there on Saturday - there is something even more fundamental at play.
Bandwidth.
Many league and rugby fans had invested a lot of time and emotional energy into the Warriors’ season of rejuvenation and the All Blacks’ mostly engaging World Cup campaign.
In short, the footy season feels finished.
Add to that a lack of understanding about the nascent Pacific Championship and the WXV and it was always destined for a measure of indifference. I will watch most things sporting without complaint but I had zero interest in watching any more rugby union this weekend.
If it wasn’t a transtasman clash, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the league either, but I’m pleased I carved out the 80 minutes. It wasn’t a great game as such because the Kangaroos stunk out the joint, but the Kiwis were mighty impressive for all that2, and a one-sided blow-out is okay when the one side is the right side.
The best part of the 30-0 win? That would be the West Coaster with the distinctive look and name, Griffin Neame, putting a cap on the performance with a solo try under the sticks.
Greymouth has a proud league tradition and has hosted some fierce occasions, including when the locals beat England 17-8 in 1946, a match that was played at harness racing venue Victoria Park, and is considered by many as the greatest sporting day in West Coast history. Neame is the latest in a long line of league heroes from the region.
Coach Michael Magurie’s future is unclear after he took the NSW Origin job, but if this is his sign-off from the Kiwis, it’s not a bad one.
Per Newshub:
“You never think a test match is going to be 30-0, but there's something special within this group, which I’ve always believed,” said Maguire. “They were able to bring it out, especially this week, but right from the start of the camp.
“Naming [James Fisher-Harris] as captain... he’s been exceptional as captain. Just the way the group has come together and the feeling they have as brothers, I felt they had a performance like that, but I was really pleased with the way they were able to defend the way they did.”
The Kiwis win was immediately greeted by the disputed news that in the wake of the poor crowd, the NRL has decided it wants to organise league tests in New Zealand. This didn’t go down too well at NZRL HQ.
A crowd of 13,269 turned out to watch the Kiwis’ historic 30-0 win over the Kangaroos in Hamilton on Saturday and soon after, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported that the NRL planned to intervene and run all test matches in New Zealand next year.
However, [NZRL CEO] Peters told Stuff on Sunday that there is no truth in this whatsoever and the NZRL will continue to run test matches on home soil.
“I don’t know where it came from. It’s disrespectful and it’s rubbish,” Peters said.
The crowds didn’t go down well at the WXV either, with 1news.co.nz highlighting England captain Marlie Packer’s disappointment.
“We want to be playing the best teams in the world and there’s no better place to do it, obviously, being here in New Zealand off the back of the World Cup - to carry on that legacy of the World Cup and that buzz around it,” Packer said.
“As a player, it was disappointing with the fans. The stadiums were empty – they weren’t what I was expecting.”
I enjoy any football writer who sharpens his quill and turns it on the wannabe sacerdotal state of Fifa, so fair dues to the estimable Jonathan Wilson, and to the headline writer who left nothing to the imagination with: “Clownish populist Infantino is complicit in Saudi Arabia’s colonisation of football.”
Wilson lists the extraordinary network of Saudi firms sponsoring football clubs (this is particularly troubling as over-inflated sponsorship deals are the easiest way to circumvent Financial Fair Play rules) and competitions, before signing off with:
How do you regulate a state, let alone one as wealthy as Saudi Arabia that has been allowed to establish such a network of interconnected influence in sport?
Perhaps Fifa could have done something but [president Gianni] Infantino, in his clownish populism, is not merely incapable, but complicit in the colonisation of the game by a state with a deplorable human rights record motivated not by doing what is right for the game, but by self-interest. All hail our Saudi overlords.
As nonsensical as it sounds, it is possible for NZ to lose their final match and still qualify for the semifinals, though it would require England to stop sulking and beat Pakistan, for Afghanistan to lose to both Australia and South Africa and, should Sri Lanka beat Bangladesh overnight, for the Teardrop Islanders to not beat NZ by enough to eclipse the NRR.
One thing I would like to hear a lot less about from commentators is players’ metre counts. Yawn.
I desperately want to love Sodhi and want him to be world class. However, I have no idea how he's got this far whilst essentially being a roadcone in the field.
Option d) stomp around the house all day Sunday, wondering if we are ever not going to get done over by arcane or obscure rules in a World Cup?
Our bowling stocks do seem very thin, compounded by injuries and loss of form. Is Milne injured as well? I know he’s not there but would have thought he would have been a better replacement than Jamieson.