Mid-week fixture: a bad wind blows through hurricanes

Midweek Fixture by Dylan Cleaver

The Crusaders are the best team in Super Rugby but they are far from the most interesting.

This is not a hit on the red and black machine – a team that plays a rugby brand that is both high level and entertaining.

Scott Robertson is cut from a single piece of cloth and is decent 80 minutes to imitate Dave Rennie and Graham Henry as the only coaches to win Super Rugby titles in their first two

The Crusaders have become so synonymous with success that the era of the Blackadder Eight seasons – where they missed the playoffs one time but who did not finish better than the second – will be judged as lost years.

a boring column on how the Crusaders use phrases like "synonymous with success" (see above) and "culture of success", and you would do it without fear of contradiction. The online link to this column would probably be shared several times among the Cantabres on Facechat.

Or you could rather look at the Hurricanes and write something like, "What happened there ..? 19659003] The Wellington-based franchise is, by the length of Trentham's straight line, the most intriguing team of Super Rugby. They are also the most inexplicable side of the competition, having spent most of the second half of the season playing like lost little boys.

Chris Boyd seems to have spent the last few months on an island with just one volley. for the company. When, in one of his last coaching acts, he explained that any team would have lost against the Crusaders at age 20, he appeared ready to run into the sea.

It's not so much the fact that they did not beat the Crusaders, which, if you refer to paragraphs one through five, is a difficult task, but the realization that they have never given a punch. There was more fighting in the CEO's Twitter account in the last month than in the field. The Hurricanes were a collective version of Joseph Parker between rounds 1 and 10, without the final gust.

The transcendent talent of the team, most often seen with a 10 on the back, seemed strangely helpless. While talking about Beauden Barrett giving in to Richie Mo's unga in the international hierarchy could be a clickbait construct, if the All Blacks selection was a true meritocracy based on the current form, could you really complain if Richie Mo & # 39; unga went to the head of the queue?

Barrett was really the symptom of greater discomfort in the capital. Yes, apologists can point out that the Hurricanes did better than 11 other teams; they could argue that they were weakened by the major injuries.

All this may be true and yet it seems so shallow, insincere, after the lowering of expectations.

Having left Christchurch for the second time in two of the months without showing anything except a false humility, it is not unreasonable to ask if a cold wind was blowing through this ultra-talented team.

Assistant coach turned coach John Plumtree should take responsibility for the collapse of the camp

His Hurricanes are already the most interesting plot of 2019.

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Everyone did not agree with last week's assessment that Super Rugby's qualifying and playoff format was the best. thing about the competition. Most of the comeback seems to come from Hamilton, where the third division leaders are based off-five-in-their-division.

Guess what? The top two teams made the final, which will be welcomed by the division's winner with the best record. If you were neutral, you should have admitted that it worked rather well, is not it?

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The netball community has had time to digest the "results" of the review in the terrible money ferns. Commonwealth Games Campaign. Hopefully, there are real nuggets and insights in the sealed section because, after what I saw, all Mildred or Edna who watched the ferns over the course of two past years could have reached these conclusions.

A slightly different point of view this week, with no connection to a feature as such, but rather with one of the deepest paragraphs that I'm having. I read in a sports book and comes from Steven Adams. "Representing New Zealand as a young athlete costs a lot of money, not only in basketball but in all sports … I knew players who would go on every trip, at least once a week. year, because their parents could easily afford for each tournament, but there were a lot of players, mostly brown, some of the best in the country, who never represented New Zealand because they could not get allow the lawsuit, let alone flying abroad.I hate to think how many guys I played with who could have had careers in basketball if we had just given them more help when they were more young people. "

This paragraph should be printed in 200-point font, turned into a poster and placed on the walls of the offices of Sports Minister Grant Robertson and Sports Tsar Peter Miskimmin.