Field Theory by Hadyn Green

After I saw the All Blacks – South Africa match I tweeted that it was the shittiest game of All Black rugby I had ever seen. I then reflected on this, surely I had seen a similar game? A game where the game plan didn't work, where none of the passes stuck, where none of the kicks went out, and where opposition seemed to know what we were going to do before we did it.

I have, but not at international level. After all, I am a Bay of Plenty supporter.

But there was a method to the madness. We were definitely able to break through the South African defence (when we could hold on to the ball) but the erratic nature of the passing, kicking short useless chips back to the South Africans or worse defensive bombs (for all of Stephen Donald's progression he still thinks that kicking the ball 100ft in the air is a good defensive tactic).

Twice we had good break that would almost certainly have ended in tries had it not been for some remarkable foul play by the Springboks. But when the South Africans were penalised with yellow cards our inept players couldn't capitalise.

I do think though that the main thing the All Blacks need to overcome is the stigma that we are a cheating team. It seems to me that we commit as many penalties as other teams but that we tend to get whistled for the more often than the opposition, especially when we travel.

I did feel for Isaac Ross whose offside move that was a bit too over the top for the ref who really didn't like anything we were doing at the breakdown. Yet South African seemed to be offside constantly without problem (admittedly our slow motion passing/kicking from the ruck meant they had a long time to get to us). They also didn't seem to mind getting up and running after being tackled (if a guy is holding onto your leg then you might just be held in the tackle).

So what's the solution? I ask because every single rugby follower in the country knows the answer. Each person may not have the same answer, however.

My solution is new blood for the players but keep the coaches. Please don't think that I'm happy with the coaches right now though, but the success rate of modern All Black coaches is quite similar. They also tend to come in to the job, fail and then succeed, again to fail again and are fired. If we feel the need to repeat this trend (and I don't know who the "we" are that I'm referring to) then let's go right ahead and replace Henry with [insert name of your favourite provincial coach].

Clearly our defence is good, however, the current coaches don't seem to have a good offensive plan and I think they need to bring in a specialist for that area. If we had someone who knew how to tap into the talent of Smith, Nonu and Sivivatu, and to teach Stephen Donald how to kick downfield, then we might just become the juggernaut we should have been.

I want to get rid of Piri Weepu. He not playing at an All Black level and all of his work is done in slow motion. I want to call up Aaron Cruden and Dan Carter, (but then again they are making the Air New Zealand cup interesting). I want to eat humble pie and get rid of Rokocoko, and I'll give Corey Jane another go, but he needs to work harder. And I want us to have a better back up on the bench for wing.

I would also like the All Blacks to play a completely clean game. No stretching of the rules, no close calls. Play completely within the rules and don't give away any penalties. This may mean that other teams have a slight advantage, but quite frankly, we're quite a good team and should be able to get over that hurdle.

And while we're at it, can we have someone come in – preferably of a "Meads" disposition – and talk to some of the young guys at Super 14 level and tell them that perhaps they could stay in New Zealand for a bit and not wander off overseas because it looks so damn shiny.

But we, the rugby public, all agree that something has to change.

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On other matters: Netball New Zealand have launched a new social networking site, MyNetball. It looks like a fairly good site, though they must've spent hours on the name (I joke).

Also, I'm in Auckland for two-weeks so I'm heading to the Auckland v Canterbury clash this weekend. I expect it to be a wonderful contrast-and-compare experience to the Otago shield challenge last week (sad for the southerners).

Through complete happenstance I found myself last night talking with Steve Martin and Bruce Carvell, the Otago head coach and forwards coach.

I have found that coaches tend to be more fun to talk to (although not during press conferences when they tend to clam up). They like to talk and joke around and tend to have interesting a much more interesting view on the system in which they sit, than players or management.

So we talked about various things.

Stadiums: I wanted to know if Bluechip in Tauranga was any good. Apparently it is. The coches were happy that it was a warm place to play and the ground was always dry and fast. And while the stock car track wasn't the nicest look the low slope on the stands meant a lot of light. Staying at Mount Maunganui was good except it was hard to keep the players minds in the right frame when all they wanted to do was surf.

Statistics: After Amy and I mentioned how we analyse data for a living, Bruce told us of a baseball manager who came to speak to the Academy of Sport. This guy was one of the first managers to use sabermetrics to select new players (analysing statistical attributes outside of straight hits or strikes etc). This style of player selection appeals to a team like Otago that doesn't have the money of the bigger teams and needs to make "smarter" player choices.

The Shield: we didn't talk about this too much as it seemed to be too much "work talk" but they sure are happy to have Adam Thompson available.

They also alerted me to, league convert, Michael Witt's new blog. I had a look today, he's no Ian O'Brian. Witt's not playing this weekend either, that isn't on the blog.

Hands down though the funnest thing (and a little surreal as I reflect on it) last night was talking to two Air New Zealand Cup coaches about mascots. Did you know Otago's mascot is Shaq the Cat? And that he was stolen from the Otago Nuggets basketball team? Crazy.

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Speaking of the Air New Zealand Cup, OMG it starts tonight!

Don't give me any of that bullshit about it starting on a Thursday night with the marquee match-up of Taranaki v Tasman. No one in their right mind would open a tournament like that, when there's a Ranfurly Shield match between two teams who could be quite evenly matched. Or a match between former goliath Auckland and battling underdog Hawkes Bay.

No, it's best all round if we forget that Thursday match happened (not that I imagine anyone watched it).

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Here are a few things you may not know about this weekend's Tri-Nations test match between South Africa and New Zealand.

Firstly we have a chance to win back the Raeburn Shield that we lost to them last week. No I hadn't heard of it either until I was emailed the website by Randall Munro this week.

It works like this: the first test match ever was played between England and Scotland in 1871. Scotland won the game and the Shield, since then it's been a bit like the World Heavyweight boxing title, if you beat the holder, you get the Shield.

This means the Raeburn Shield has been through some interesting sets of hands, like Samoa in 99 when they beat Wales, and Romania in 1984 when they beat Scotland. Naturally the Shield tends to stay in the clutches of the Tri-Nations and Six Nations teams (though never Italy), but it has moved 166 times.

The best defender is New Zealand. We've had the Shield 33 times and defended it 129 times, including an 18 game streak. But South Africa has held it for a longer time 20,213 days.

Yeah, of course it's not a real Shield, yet, but the creators want to get it officially recognised by the IRB. Until then it's just an interesting thing to track. Oh and the name comes from Raeburn Place, the venue of that first test in 1871.

Second interesting piece of information from Caleb Borchers (a fellow uniform freak and new Dropkick):

The political world of South Africa is typically a baffling mess to most people not living within the shores of the republic (and to many who do). This was particularly evident in the recent fiasco that occurred over what symbols would appear on the Springbok jersey.

Basically the SARU was required to add the Protea by the governing authorities. After much haggling it was decided that the Springbok could remain, but had to switch sides of the jersey and it needed to be smaller than the Protea.

Turning away from the political infighting for a moment, the new jersey looks little different than the old. The Sprinbok logo does look nicer now that it is no longer crowded by the old Protea/ball logo (and the attendant, multiple copyright symbols). The overall look, however, is more cluttered. This will be even truer when the next RWC comes around, and Canterbury will need to find space for its own logo, the Sprinbok, the Protea, and the RWC patch. Australia, another team that commonly wears two logos, has to opt to remove one to make room for the IRB logo.

One can safely bet that the battle over which South African symbol to remove will be hot and heavy, and likely end with all four appearing on the jersey in one jumbled mess.

The whole issue strikes at the pettiness of many parties involved. One could argue that the Springbok loyalists are fighting for a time that has passed. They are holding to a symbol that too often was tied to hatred and prejudice.

On the other side, Nelson Mandela embraced the Springbok as a symbol for all of South Africa in the much publicized ceremonies that occurred after the 1995 RWC. He also was personally involved in making sure the Springbok did not disappear from the national rugby team during the fall of apartheid.

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of the apartheid system, thought highly of both symbols (the Protea and the Springbok) and desired for both to appear on the national flag. Trying to claim moral or historical priority seems to simplify a complex history. The Springbok is the historic symbol of the rugby team (and all the baggage that includes), so removing it would take away memories of many painful times, but also many glorious moments in the team's history.

The eventual choice to include both symbols mimics the general approach of the SARU to selecting anything. Avoid controversy at all costs. In that way the new Protea/Bok look fits South Africa well. Its inclusiveness and indecisiveness represents the constant pressures that South Africa still faces to please everyone, and the eventuality that they please no one.

And due to popular demand when I get Offlode's prediction this week I'll put it in the comments.
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Finally, next Wednesday I'll be interviewing someone from Canterbury NZ about their uniforms. If you want to ask them anything now's your chance.

Should a swimsuit that cuts time off your lap be allowed in international competition? It's like a national referendum question; you want to answer, "sort of".

Like if there is a race that comes down to .0001 seconds difference and winning swimmer's encased in super-thin woven elastane-nylon and polyurethane and the other's in board-shorts then you might think that the LZR suits are cheating somehow.

Or if all the swimmers have them, then it would seem ok, right? Or is it still cheating?

Swimming is about whom can travel the fastest through water over a particular distance while doing a particular thing with their arms and legs. Obviously to go faster the swimmers would remove bits of clothing (and hair), because the swimmers want to show exactly how fast they can go without hindrance. Of course you don't remove everything because the drag caused by clothes is less than the drag caused by your (ahem) dangly-doos.

Given there are certain constants we are working with (the viscosity of water for example) and certain constrained variables (human skin surface area etc) world records of this type should be asymptotic, right?

So, at the risk of being laughed at in the future, we will never see a 219 second Men's 400m freestyle. At the very best we will be able to measure the times better, shaving smaller and smaller amounts off the world record, unless we change the rules.

So, is a suit that keeps you more buoyant and slides through water better than skin, removing hindrances or adding advantages?

The Speedo LZR suits were officially released in 2008 and as it currently stand only two men's records (1,500m and 800m Freestyle, both to Grant Hackett) and one women's record (1,500m freestyle to Kate Zielger) were broken before 2008.

I made a wee chart of the records for men's events that have been broken so far this year to see if there were any noticeable trends that the introduction of the new suits might have caused. Note: I only did men's events because there were too many women's events where the world record was broken this year (12 in total and eight of those were at the World Champs) and I'm kind of lazy like that. Click for a bigger version.

(the 400m freestyle is plotted against the right axis, all others against the left)

As you can see my 400m freestyle prediction wasn't totally crazy. But take a look at the 100m backstoke.

The record took a big dip in 1991 when Jeff Rouse shaved 0.58 seconds off the previous time. Then in 2004 Aaron Peirsol grabbed the record by first shaving 0.15, then 0.28, then 0.19, then 0.09 seconds off. Then at the Olympics last year he removed another 0.35 seconds. Finally this year, at the world champs, Peirsol regained the record (he had lost for seven days) by taking 0.44 seconds off.

That 0.44 seconds represents the second largest margin that the record has been broken by in almost 50 years. And this came after Peirsol had already broken the previous record by a combined 1.06 seconds. Clearly he's a good swimmer but that 0.44 and the 0.35 before it seem to be almost too good. The suit is making good swimmers into world record holders and world record holders into world record destroyers.

The Science of Sport noted that veteran swimmer, Frederick Bosquet, breaking the 50m freestyle world record by 0.34 seconds was the equivalent of a 2:14 marathon runner showing up and running a 2:06 in their tenth year. And then they raised this very good non-scientific point:

…there is a fundamental problem when the history of the sport is basically rewritten. Legends of swimming have been relegated to footnotes within a year, men and women who featured in the top 10 of all time now lie outside the top 20 and there is an unnatural distribution of times by era.

But more than this, the problem is that swimming records are now broken so often that they lack all credibility. And while some will argue that the point is the race, not the time (which is partly true), there is a lot to be said for history of sport, and the perception among sports followers (not necessarily swimming followers) when record-holders emerge from nowhere and are replaced only months later by similarly 'unknown' swimmers - the suits have enabled this scenario.

FINA has now banned the suits, so what do we do with those records? It's certainly possible that some of those times won't be beaten for a very long time now. Do we append all of them with asterisks or do we let them sit?

In the end it could be that the only people to win the in the swimsuit wars were the perverts.

I know that deep down none of you really actually care about sport. Really you're all just heartless result-junkies just waiting for the next score, hoping for some hot tip to run with back to your filthy opium-riddled gambling dens. You sicken me.

But what can I say, I ‘m a pusher: who wants a hot tip?

Offlode is the analytics company that brought us the very interesting study into the relative evenness of various competitions around the world. During the Super 14 they were sending me some very interesting spreadsheets. They were full of predictions for games based on previous performances (I know it's not the greatest measure).

But the thing about their lodeings is that they get better over time. So by the end of that particular competition they were able to do some very fine grained predictions. Perfect stuff to pop down to the TAB with. In fact I was I doing very well in the office sweeps until I started going out for a drink instead of sending in my picks.

For the Tri-Nations Offlode have been adding TAB odds into their calculations as a proxy for the intuition of rugby fans (there are problems with this as I'm sure you can see). And so last week Offlode predicted the All Blacks to win with a 58 percent chance or rather to score 58 percent of the points, which is how their system works. As it was the 22-16 score line meant the All Blacks scored 57.8 percent of the points.

This week isn't looking so good. Offlode has the All Blacks with a 35 percent chance of winning and they agree with the TAB's odds of a 6-point Springbok victory.

Provided South Africa aren't paying somewhere between $1.48 and $1.58, then our confidence interval for the margin is above 6. This would suggest that taking South Africa at the line (-6.5) isn't a bad bet. Importantly, [the data] shows that if South Africa are favourites with the Bookies, our model also has them as favourites (although there isn't any meaningful overlay). Worst case scenario from a South African perspective is when their odds are around the 1.50 mark, but even then they are expected to win.

Bugger, eh?

On this morning's Nine to Noon, Kathryn Ryan spoke with head sports reporter for the Sunday Times of London, David Walsh, on his assertion that professional sport is destroying the things we hold dear about sport itself.

Walsh has written books on the doping scandals that have plagued cycling in recent years, so I was expecting him to lament the loss of true human talent and inspirational feats. Instead his arguments were based on nostalgic views towards a better time, somewhere in the past, when he started watching sport.

That was the time when there was no sledging, no cheating, and true respect for the sport and your competition. I don't know when Walsh started watching sport but it must have been a wondrous time, possibly before the invention of television and radio.

Walsh's main argument did ring true however. It used to be that sportspeople had to earn a living in order to fund their sport (much like netball, today); this gave them experience in the working world of regular schmoes like you and me. Now the players can leave school and all they have to do (if they are good enough) is show up for promotional activities. This means that when they get into their 30s professional players are at a loss of what to do next, with many scrounging for work at second division teams. Though I felt Walsh spent too much time focusing on how "this generation plays too many computer games and the Facebook".

Walsh cites Jannie and Bismarck Du Plessis as good examples of how professional sportsmen can be. Both play for Sharks in the Super 14 and also work on their family farm. Jannie is also a doctor while Bismarck is an insurance broker.

The idea is that working in (sharp intake of breath) the real world gives players a perspective they don't have in the sports world. While the accomplishments and lessons they learn on the field can be brought back into their working lives.

But is this really a call for a return to amateurism? The reason why we have professional sports is that it works, commercially, and Walsh acknowledges this. Sport, even the sport we complain about, brings in big dollars.

I think what Walsh is trying to say, as he trips himself up in nostalgia, is that we would really like our professional athletes, coaches, sporting bodies and fans to have a bit of perspective. Sometimes winning isn't everything.

This caught my attention after Simon G said yesterday:

The appeal of the Ashes? It's sport. It's about winning and losing. Or in Cardiff, thrillingly drawing. It's as simple as ... people really caring about the result.

It's not about growing the brand, enhancing the franchise, and optimising market share going forward.

Note that the result is not the same as winning and losing. The result is the overall game, were the players playing in the spirit of the game or were they actually trying to subvert the rules to win.

Walsh uses the example of eye-gouging; how much do you want to win that you are willing to damage another person's sight?

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In other professional sports news, New Zealand is going to get a new provincial rugby competition. Or rather the structure of the current one will change.

This is what it'll look like:

That's 11 weeks of New Zealand provincial rugby at the tail end of winter/beginning of spring.

Division One (not to be confused with the Premier Division) has only six teams in it. These are the four teams from the current Air New Zealand Cup who don't do well on the Solvency Test and Assessable Criteria, (as agreed to by participating Air New Zealand Cup Provincial Unions). So I imagine that'll be: Counties, Northland, Tasman and Manuwatu. They'll be joined by the two best teams from the current Heartland Division.

And yes. There will be automatic promotion and relegation between the Premier Division and Division One. Currently there will be no swapping between the Heartland and Division Una, though that is still up for discussion.

Oh it's exciting times we live in, isn't it?