Yes, yes, there is an All Black test tomorrow morning. We will get to that in a minute.
The most important thing happening in New Zealand sport this weekend is kicking off at Sky Stadium in Wellington at 5pm today.
The Kiwi Clasico, the A-League New Zealand derby, has the potential to be one of the special dates on our sporting calendar.
It is bound to get spicy, there is guaranteed to be drama and taking part in games of this intensity can only be a good thing for the Kiwis involved in the game.
My football passion is Liverpool, but I’ve been a casual Wellington Phoenix fan since the club was established.
Now, as a football fan from the South Island, am I allowed to have a bob each way? A cracking 3-3 draw would be ideal.
Three big weeks
The All Blacks, even with a largely second-string team, were always going to open their northern tour with a big win over Japan.
It will be the next three weekends that really tell us something about this team.
Beat England, Ireland and France — a seriously impressive achievement — and all will be well in the land of Scotts Robertson and Barrett.
Lose one of them and that still has to be considered a reasonable effort.
Lose two or (gulp) all three, and ... oof, that could be a problem.
Remember, the All Blacks have already lost three tests this year. Five or six losses in a calendar year would be a grim reminder they are not in a great place at all.
There will be intense interest in whether the All Blacks can find some attacking mojo against defensively staunch northern teams, whether Beauden Barrett can be a world-class first five again and whether Wallace Sititi ends the tour as the first name written on the teamsheet.
Most of all, we will watch closely to see whether Robertson is finally starting to bring something fresh to this All Blacks team.
Rugby’s ‘resurgence’
It really is spin season.
New Zealand Rugby has been extolling the virtues of the NPC — before, it seems certain, tweaks will come as the reality of its financial unsustainability is laid bare.
Now comes the gushing press release about the boom in numbers at the community level.
One must not be too cynical. Total player numbers are up 6%, juniors (up 4200 players) and females (up 4300) are rising, and coaching numbers are up 10%.
But the devil can be in the detail sometimes.
Teenage boy numbers are up 5%, they say. Happy days. But bear in mind these are all post-Covid numbers, rebounding from the damage done during, and actually before, the pandemic years.
Turn back the clock and you will find there were 42,000 teenaged boys playing rugby in New Zealand in 2014. Ten years on, that number plummets to 29,000.
We have lost 13,000 teenagers in a decade, and you can only spin that so much.
Make it make sense
“The addition of the Panthers is a strategic move to take this entertainment business into India.’’
That is, without question, one of the most bizarre and depressing sentences your man has read since he joined the world of sports journalism in 1998.
It was contained in a press release about this ludicrous development of two Indian teams joining the National Basketball League — yes, a New Zealand domestic sports competition. A press release, by the way, that came from Sky Television and not, you know, the actual league.
Justin Nelson, who used to run the NBL but is now at Sky with the title ‘‘head of commercialisation and fandom’’, waxes lyrical about the decision to bring Indian teams into our league, and the opportunities that will bring for 1.4billion new fans (they won’t care, mate) and the promotion of Kiwi agriculture, tourism and education in India (eh?).
There sure is a lot of nonsense being spouted about a New Zealand league opening its doors to an organisation, INBL Pro, that was recently locked in a court battle with the Basketball Federation of India, and had to can its franchise-based hoops extravaganza this year.
Happy to be proven wrong, but this feels like a pie-in-the-sky cash grab that is not going to end well.
Names of the week
Regular readers will be aware The Last Word has a bit of an obsession with weird, wonderful and hilarious names. (Never any offence intended, by the way.)
So, as we previously presented the greatest names from the American college football system, sit back and enjoy these bobby-dazzlers from college basketball. All real-life young men in the NCAA system.
Good names: Always Wright, Po’boigh King, Supreme Cook, Churchill Bounds, Moses Hipps, Sir Mohammad, Tony Toney.
Great names: Gob Gob, Tennessee Rainwater, Phat Phat Brooks, Cli’ron Hornbeak, Snookey Wigington, Townsend Tripple, Zytarious Mortle, Solo Ball.
The greatest name: Jizzle James.
