I’ve never seen a thing like this before, both players were ruled to have lifted simultaneously, both contributing equally to the foul play and both were given a yellow. Somehow the Magpies only managed to score 1 try while against 13 players and almost conceded one too.
Sam Smith, the Hawke’s Bay 7 being lifted here tucked his head & rolled so actually came down quite safely all things considered and played out the rest of the match A-OK.
Yeah first phase Australia looked much better, and they were also more patient were able to build phases and still look like they had a plan going deep into them. After 5 or 6 phases the ABs attack fairly consistently fell apart and looked like it didn’t really have a successful out.
Pretty consistently through this year though its the out wide defence and then lack of punch on gain line that’s the worry heading up north. Defence in particular has gone backwards this year, the system looks very exploitable.
Still think Razor was a bit slow on pulling the trigger on getting the bench on, but the forwards replacements in particular did really well once they were on.
The question from the game is, has Schmidt coached a bunch of lesser players to perform well above their #10 ranking, or are Razor’s ABs just that clunky at the moment?
As I type, the ABs have only 18 minutes to build a lead before the final quarter begins and we get to see if they’ll be shut out 6 games in a row.
Well I didn’t expect my prediction for the Magpies to be bang on. Crazy game.
First time I’ve ever seen two players get sinbinned a simultaneous action of foul play.
Schmidt’s still got it with the set plays eh, they’re right in the hunt.
Re that last point about the ARU and their financial viability, here’s an interesting counterpoint from NZ: https://archive.ph/nVtt6
Basically, the argument is that bc ARU couldn’t get any vulture capital, they haven’t made the same mistake as NZR and other professional unions so are getting to keep 100% of any revenue they make. NZR have to pay $20m annually to Silver Lake now - for basically doing nothing other than one lump sum that’s going to be gone shortly.
So, unlike NZ - Australia doesn’t need to try to chase every possible dollar, they just need to work for the most efficient dollars instead.
Well, coming out of that match, which the ABs were extremely lucky to win in the end they’re now carrying some injuries which will make the next match in the hoodoo city of Wellington interesting.
5 games on the trot now that Razor’s ABs have been held scoreless in the final 20 minutes, given how average we know the Wallabies have been this year i’d say the ABs will be lucky to walk away with a 2/5 (Italy & Japan) on the end of year tour. Potentially heavy defeats awaiting in Ireland & France, and some revenge for England. Italy are playing the ABs last match of the tour, if there was ever a chance to pick up a first win, this would be it.
The ABs have been ruthless punishing mistakes; so to a degree the Aussies have made some of those tries by dumb passes. They’re competing well in the 2nd quarter and have cut out a lot of their silly mistakes so when they’re not being dumb its a lot more even.
Argentina has a couple of clubs in SRA, weirdly there’s also a USA based club. I wonder if there’s a a bit of friction between that comp and MLR. To be honest, I worry about the latter’s competitiveness given the age of some of the veterans still playing, and how many never would be Super Rugby players are so good in it. Having said that, it probably is about as good as SRA so a champions cup style thing ought to work for them if it’s financially viable.
Yeah I think an annual, limited comp would be good - though i’d go with URC, SR, Prem, Top 14 and it’d be great to find some way to include Japan League 1’s winner too. Though probably more than 2 games is too many.
I didn’t mean to say that SA didn’t add to Super Rugby - especially early on they were crucial to it, just to try to show that its not that they were really good that helped NZ, because they weren’t.
What NZR & Super Rugby needs to try to encourage is another team or two to play like the Blues & Brumbies - because especially the former played a massively forward oriented, direct and physical game - very much the DNA of South African rugby.
Do that, then Japan League 1 has so many better opportunities for NZ if we would just show a bit of humility and try to fix that relationship more. They increasingly have strong clubs, they are in the same timezone as NZ and play at fairly similar times of the year, it is about a natural fit for NZ & Aus as SA joining the URC is.
The vibe down here is probably a bit more nuanced, and the calls to have SA back are a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to less than stellar results so its hard to be sure how it might go down.
There’s a few things people could probably stand to calm down & reconsider, in my opinion…
Firstly, before the SA clubs joined URC Ireland were doing very well, and Scotland were definitely on the improve. Of the original nations in that comp Italy have improved - but mostly on the back of one club, so a tight integration similar to the Jaguares and Wales are dire. So correlation/causation etc its not necessarily true that presence of the SA clubs are making those nations better, nor is it true that the lack of them is why NZ has been struggling.
Secondly, people are really forgetting how bad SA’s clubs were in Super Rugby in the last couple of years before the competition fell apart due to Covid. In 2019 only 4 teams won more than 8/16 games, and none of them were South African. In 2018 it was both better and somehow even worse, where 4/5 NZ teams won more than 10/16, and no other club did with Waratahs, Lions & Jaguares all managing 9/16. And in both years the worse of the SA teams had negative points differentials too.
Thirdly, because of the time difference and South Africa’s challenges holding night games, the matches over there were at awful times and have almost no benefit for the broadcasters this side of the competition. To make it even worse, because of the expense of flying all that way the touring structure would see your home team disappear for 3-4 weeks so you would go a month with no match in your home stadium.
Yup, and then if I look back on when I learnt maths in primary school, 39-31 years ago. We wrote learnt a bunch of maths, but the bulk of it was dumb calculation that beyond a certain amount is just easier to whack into a calculator these days. Its like people have forgotten that sure, in the 80s we didn’t have a calculator at hand all of the time, so being able to do it in your head was really beneficial. Nowadays everyone carries a powerful computer in their pocket and going beyond 3 digit equations its mostly better to get it right first time with the tool than risk getting it wrong in your head.
The same holds true with your Ancient Egypt - Ancient Rome analogy; what’s important is not knowing facts about those two long dead civilisations, but knowing how to evaluate the various facts you might find with that pocket computer of yours and establish which is more likely to be reliable etc.
Its the same as the UK austerity playbook that as wrecked the NHS.
Remember that the stats they’re using to argue achievement is going real bad don’t actually say that. They show lower achievement but the academics who look at the study & whatnot advise that that’s because the methodology changed, not that achievement actually went down in real terms.
Oh funny - I just posted Max Rashbrooke’s article on the impact of changes from The Spinoff and that’s my take too - school lunches = achievement, we are worried about achievement, so let’s cut lunches. Seymour is actually cartoonishly evil at times.
Worth noting that this government has railed against supposed falling achievement rates*, yet are cutting one of the most effective interventions that improves outcomes for lowest achievers.
Switching from cooking in schools to heat & eat is extremely dumb, especially if they’re in microwave packaged individual portions - microwaving doesn’t scale well.
*Previous discussion on what the maths curriculum changes are, and how they’re responding to a “crisis” that doesn’t really exist: https://lemmy.nz/post/14030275 https://archive.is/YK9gk
Well, double tragedy for me. In the wet on Saturday night and with Fakatava going out with an injury pre-game the Magpies got absolutely punished by Waikato. Nothing went right for them, and pretty much everything went right for the Mooloos.
Then that got compounded by those heathens Tasman managing to win their first Shield defence after taking it off us last weekend.
That’s bizarre; unless somehow NZR/Sky have sold the rights to show the NPC over in your neck of the woods (which sounds improbable).
I’m very left wing so obviously my opinion is very biased in that direction, but I think Key gets a great deal of pump up from the political commentary classes because he did the politicking part of running a government successfully. He was able to keep the National party on message, was able to fudge away a bunch of different controversies without getting tarred by them and is still probably the most popular National leader of the last 20+ years.
However, if we look back at what Key’s government actually did its pretty clear to me that the outcomes of their policies are bad, are being felt now and will be felt for a long time to come.
As one example, tax cut obsession, plus austerity during and after the GFC downturn has seen a huge degradation and under-investment in infrastructure. The only reason they “balanced” budgets is by not putting money in where it was needed. That’s why Dunedin, Nelson, Hawke’s Bay etc are so desperate for new hospitals and why they are so expensive now.
Its a bit of a blunt exaggeration but the infrastructure you build today is almost always going to be cheaper than what you build tomorrow. And then the infrastructure they did build, such as Transmission Gully, was done as a PPP, which in the long run basically always costs more than doing it ourselves. Massive over-investment in roading and under-investment in rail & coastal shipping also locked in (and now Simeon is doubling down) transport emissions for decades.