Posts by Tom Semmens
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
One wonders how politically explosive anyone getting hold of photocopies of the originals of perfectly legal cheques paid to the Waitemata trust anytime in the last five-six years might be during an election campaign. As Gordon Campbell says, the real winner in all this is the EFA, although the Herald's editors would rather be beaten to death with a helium balloon that admit that. Winston Peters is turning this whole affair into a battle between him and senior press gallery journalists, and listening to the highly personalised "us vs. Winston" slant in a lot of the comments coming from Espiners, Garners et al. it seems it is working. That’ll play straight to his constituency, I am sure Winston will garner thousands of votes just from people who want to luxuriate in some of those hated journo's having to report through gritted teeth on the return of NZ First to parliament.
-
I am afraid, yet again, that obnoxious gloater Stephen Jones has hit the nail on the head in the The Times...
"...New Zealand were once again revealed as possessing terrific effort and commitment, yet very little in terms of true world class. They were also shown to be a one-trick pony, as all they had was a game of endless passing and movement without reference points..."
Why do we continually play like that? I hold it is because our system produces players who play like that. Players who would have won the 1995 RWC.
Kyle, time to wake up. Lomu would have been a phenomena of any time, but today he would be less effective. The Terry Wright/John Kirwin combo was 75 and 96kg respectively. Lomu weighed in around 115-120kg and was running over 80-90kg opponents like, famously, Mike Catt.
Nowadays Lote Tuqiri and Sivivatu are both in the 100-105kg range, and that is nothing remarkable. "Small" is relative these days, Brian Habana looks like a midget on the paddock but he is 96kg or so.
The idea that one dimensional players like Sivivatu or Nonu can still have a place at the very top of professional rugby - surely, where the All Blacks should be - is now rapidly becoming out of date.
-
Saying "Islanders can't kick" or "white men can't jump" is as stupid as saying "All Germans are good soldiers."
Anyone can jump, anyone can kick. What I am saying is the system used by the NZRFU to identify elite players has a rational bias in favour of a particular style and type of player.
To me, being a professional goes like this:
To be a surgeon, you must first master the profession. There are plenty of surgeons who are geniuses, but no genius is automatically a surgeon.
Same with professional rugby. The likes of Nonu are not good professionals, because they haven't mastered all the skills of their profession. They have a thrilling physical genius, but physical genius doesn't win professional sports encounters at the very highest level. As long as we have a talent identification system biases towards big, one dimensional Islander type players, our system won't produce properly professional players.
-
Shep: No, I am not. Nor would I say that of Michael Jones. Significantly, neither of those players were products of our stratified, top down, professional structure.
What I am saying is our system favours a type of player that is no good at the very top, and it just so happens genetics mean that most of those favoured players come from Island backgrounds.
-
"...I wonder if the overseas selection rule needs to be debated by the NZ rugby board...."
According to Peter Fitzsimons on NatRad he was the first foreign player to ever play for his old French club team. This season, 36 out of the 40 players in that team are not Frenchmen. Apparently, a rugby club is the fashion accessory de jour for the Francophone millionaire set, hence the departure of Gaisnier and Sonny Bill-Williams.
Anyone else feel a soupçon of schadenfreude watching an Aussie club owner whining about losing players to another country and code with more money?
-
The best comment is usually from Drake lately we've had the sober views from Drake Peter Bills.
What pisses me off is we still find it acceptable that a highly paid professional player selected as a back that can't kick. The Super 14 showed us the ELV's encourage a kick and chase game.
For that reason, I would say ALL our big Islander origin players are now obsolete in professional rugby. They are big and one dimensional, and everyone is their size at international level - only the other guys are mentally tougher and have a greater skill set. The trouble is, New Zealand rugby is fixated on the big, naturally athletic and hugely physical Islanders.
I think this is because our top down game is organised on the principle the All Blacks are everything, and everything is subservient to them. The NZRFU has abandoned the provinces and has abandoned the idea of players serving an apprenticeship in their provinces in favour of talent identification at an early age and use of age group representative rugby to provide enough talent to the Super 14.
Our system favours the big Islanders who stand out early on, and it means ALL the players picked for NZ teams have spent their whole playing career walking along the red carpet rolled out in front of them. The first time they experience something going wrong, something to sort the ferral and the cunning from the naive and the lazy, it's in the big time - when it is to late.
Oh and Chris Rattue should be doing the political coverage in the Herald, where his balanced views will be much appreciated. How long can you keep writing when you've so boxed yourself into a corner?
-
For all the talk of "you broke, so you have to fix it" around the timetable for a US withdrawl from Iraq, I actually can't see any way out America's latest piece of imperial hubris except through fleeing with their tail between their legs. For all the humiliation of running away and leaving a mess for the Iranians to happily inherit, it'll still be cheaper for the USA than trying to hang on. Pity about the Iraqis and Americans who have died for nothing, and trillions of dollars printing their way into world stagflation, but hey - that's George W. Bush's legacy for you.
Oh, and I long for the day an American president works out that Iran will, in the long run, make a much better ally for the US in the Middle East than Israel ever will.
-
200,000 people in Berlin! Still, I hear those Germans are suckers for a charismatic public speaker...
In many ways Obama is a reaction to the cronyism and corruption of the Bush administration, so my biggest concern for Obama is he is being elected as a change candidate from an electorate with impossibly high expectations. The potential for disillusionment with not just the political process but with democracy itself is high if he turns out to be a failure or has his policy agenda defeated by the U.S. corporate oligarchs.
-
Actually two words: Laura Calder and Beverly Turner. *sigh* and *melt*
-
As long as the living channel can still feature eccentric Englishmen clutching an umbrella whilst happily rambling through a swamp in search of the bog that may have been the place an obscure 18th century travel writer paused for a puff on his/her pipe, or jumping into large holes in the ground to examine incredibly boring pieces of pottery with all the boyish enthusiasm of a 14 year old discovering a hole in wall of the girls changing room, I'll keep it on.
Oh and then there is the Food Channel. Two Words: Laura Calder. *sigh*