When hope gives way to expectation
A day at the league, PLUS: Tennis, golf, cricket, triathlon and football
The planning and execution couldn’t have gone much better.
The tickets were bought, the collaborators were ready and waiting to be picked up, the journey was stress-free and the car was parked free of charge 1.1km from the ground but crucially pointing in the right direction for a swift post-match getaway.
The walk was pleasantly communal, the queues at the gate were processed swiftly and the weather stayed perfect for footy. Seats were taken to the south, with a view straight down the pitch, the forecast stiff breeze skirting across the top of what used to be Mt Smart/Rarotonga before it was quarried out of existence and replaced by a charmless stadium.
It was perfectly set up for a great afternoon of footy, then the whistle blew and - near silence.
Where were we? The Auckland Central Library?
This was not expected. Not what I had promised my crew. The teen had deep-fried donuts, so was happy enough, but where was the noise, the fervour, the fidelity to the home team?
At the risk of delving into the psychology of crowds, a specialty I am not qualified in, my sense is that Warriors fans have made the collective switch from hope to expectation.
Hope can be cruel and it can be blind, but it stirs great passion.
Expectation is different. It weds you to outcomes, which can lead you to forget how much fun the process is.
Once it became obvious who the best team was yesterday, Go Media Stadium became all the fun of the fair again, but that airless first 15 minutes will stick with me, as will the magnificence of the final 65 minutes.
This team is 4REAL, writes Michael Burgess in the NZ Herald.
If there was any doubt about the Warriors’ playoff credentials this season, there can’t be now.
This was brutal, beautiful and bewitching.
The Warriors dismantled Cronulla. After a quiet, conservative start that matched the crowd, they tore into their work, exposing the Sharks’ left edge defence mercilessly. The scoreline did not flatter them.
Shaun Johnson, in his 200th game for the club, will get the plaudits and deservedly so. He’s mixing his passing game beautifully and even though his kicking game was hit and miss the 40-20 in the first half was the perfect nudge for the perfect time.
You expect big games from Johnson, from the mountainous Addin Fonua-Blake, from Tohu Harris, Dallin Watene-Zelezniak and Wayde Egan. It’s the lesser expected contributors that must have the coaching staff giddy with excitement.
Rocco Berry is all of a sudden an NRL-class centre and his ceiling appears even higher. Luke Metcalf likewise at five-eighth. Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad might not possess the raw talent of Reece Walsh but he’s better suited for this team than the Queensland superstar. Mitchell Barnett represents a good piece of business.
The top end of the table is extremely tight, The Panthers have the title-winning pedigree but I’m not sure you can look at any one of those sides and say the Warriors match up poorly to them.
They’re in this.
“Regardless of who we play each week, we just want to win.
“Where they’re ranked or where they come, it doesn’t matter. I just feel like we’ve beaten some really good sides that we haven’t been given enough credit for. Everyone’s so obsessed with where everyone sits on the ladder, as opposed to where they’re going to be at the end or where they’ve been before."
I’ve been to the Warriors a lot over the years. This is by far the best home team I have witnessed - I was overseas in 2002 and on RWC duty in 2011 - in the flesh.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Mt Smart just feels different.
It feels expectant.
The super sprint elimination format at the latest stop of the ITU world triathlon series is kind of bonkers, but Hayden Wilde won it so it’s fine by me.
More importantly, he beat Alex Yee for the first time in a race they have both finished, so it should do his confidence wonders. Wilde won the race by charging hard in the final two corners of the bike leg and getting a couple of seconds advantage in the transition from bike to run.
It was no fluke.
“I thought before the race, if I got into the final, my tactic if the pace was hot – and Kristian [Blummenfelt] was making it real hot at the end – was to swing around that corner and try and get one or two seconds into transition, hopefully then have a really good T2 and just don’t look back and go. Normally I fumble a little bit in T2, so I’m pretty stoked that that worked out.
“But it was a big gamble and could have definitely gone backwards.”
Wilde is second after four events of the championship series.
Has the baton been passed finally from the Big Three to Generation Next in men’s tennis?
It’s his second grand slam title and he hasn’t turned 21 yet. No wonder his coach Juan Carlos Ferrera believes he can win 30 of them.
What Alcaraz accomplished Sunday -- in a changing-of-the-guard moment that's being compared to Roger Federer's 2001 upset of Pete Sampras here in the fourth round -- is difficult to overstate. Djokovic hadn't lost a match here since 2017. He is a seven-time Wimbledon champion and already won the first two majors of this year.
His opponent was impressed, too.
“For someone of his age to handle the nerves, be playing attacking tennis, and to close out the match the way he did, he came up with some amazing shots,” Djokovic said. “The slices, the chipping returns, the net play, it’s very impressive. I didn’t expect him to play so well this year on grass, but he’s proven that he’s the best player in the world, no doubt.”
It was a weird and wonderful weekend of golf, with New Zealanders trying their part.
At North Berwick, in the final lead-in tournament to the Open Championship, Rory McIlroy played an extraordinary back nine in brutal conditions to win the Scottish Open, his first win on Scottish soil. He had to birdie the final two holes to beat local Bob MacIntyre, who had charged home with a six-under 64.
Ryan Fox shot even par to finish at -7 and in a tie for 12th. Daniel Hillier, who has had a breakthrough year on the DP World Tour, finished in a tie for 54th.
In contrast, Lydia Ko and her stand-in caddie had a collective brain freeze in the final of the Dana Open.
Ko was assessed seven penalty strokes after being notified on the 11th hole that she had improperly played preferred lies during the final round. She ended with a seven-over par 78 and finished the tournament in Sylvania, Ohio, at one-over and tied for 65th place.
If you’re like me, you find the world of seniors golf pretty niche, and a sub-niche of that is seniors amateur golf. Nevertheless, a New Zealander, Brent Paterson, won the R&A Senior Amateur by a whopping five shots.
The 62-year-old Royal Auckland and Grange Golf Club member is the first New Zealander to win the prestigious trophy since the inaugural 1969 championship… Paterson was also making his championship debut. “It’s crazy,” he said. “I played with some good golfers this week but I like being in that white hot competition. It’s just really exciting. You don’t get many of these chances in your life to win big events like this.”
Making it all the more sweet, his wife Susan was caddying for him.
The women’s Fifa World Cup starts at Eden Park on Thursday. You have to know your limitations and I don’t know enough about women’s football to offer anything approximating expertise, but I’ll point you in the direction of the best coverage and stories.
At this point, the fear over empty stadia in New Zealand has been capturing global headlines. The reasons given have been:
The Football Ferns poor results;
New Zealand can’t fall back on a rich football heritage (which is longhand for “we’re a rugby country”);
We’re last-minute shoppers;
We’re in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis;
We don’t have any idea just how BIG this event is;
Fifa and NZ Football have done a lousy job selling the stars to the public.
There is an element of truth to all of that, but if you had to rank them in terms of the biggest contributing factor, No4 would be well ahead of the rest and No5 would be the least.
If we’ve been told once we’ve been told 1000 times just how big an event it is. Sure, the country has some shortfalls in its sports coverage but we’re not all huddled around our PYE televisions, watching the test from Athletic Park - 2.30pm kickoff, thanks.
It is pointless trying to guilt the country into buying tickets. There’s tens of thousands out there trying to make their tanks of petrol last from one Gull discount day to the next; who are walking past the aisles of costly fresh fruit and veg at the supermarkets to get straight to the cheap packet meals.
Live sport might be a pleasant diversion from the pressures of life, but it is a luxury.
People will buy tickets if they’ve got a bit of spare cash in their accounts, but that will often be a game-day decision.
It might be easier to get casual punters along if the governing bodies had leaned on their biggest global partners to target the New Zealand audiences more with advertising campaigns using the biggest stars of the show, like this, and this, and this, and even this which piggybacks off the French love of Les Bleus to make a very good point…
In the absence of compelling visual campaigns, Fifa seems to have been relying on a small local media corps to pump out the words. Some have tried hard, particularly Stuff, but it is never going to have the same cut-through.
Even so, we know how big the event is. We know we are lucky to have this incredible event coming to our shores.
No, we might not be able to go to as many games as you’d like us to.
Further reading:
The Guardian has an exhaustive Women’s World Cup hub.
Major League Cricket has been a bit of a hoot, if only to remind you of the existence of one Corey Anderson, who smashed 91 not out off 52 balls in San Francisco’s opening round win. Got a mild surprise to see Anderson was still just 32. Contracted at just 16 years old by Canterbury, Anderson played 93 games for his country across all three formats, but still has to be considered one of the great what-if stories of New Zealand cricket.
His biggest problem was he just couldn’t stay fit so his bowling - which was of the golden-arm variety, particularly during the 2015 World Cup - was increasingly a non-factor and his batting was never quite good enough to carry him alone.
The New York Times ($) is along for the ride.
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In further cricket news, look out…
From the NZC press release, emphasis is mine!
Good news for cricket fans - live, ball-by-ball commentary of all home internationals and domestic finals will be available on SENZ radio this summer, with digital coverage also accessible via a partnership with NZME and the Alternative Commentary Collective.
The amount of information FIFA is asking for when you buy tickets is well beyond what they need to know to sell a ticket. And so out of principle I said no thanks. That’s my reason for not going to any games.
That French football ad is the bomb!!