Wallabies coach Dave Rennie before the first Bledisloe Cup test against the All Blacks at Sky Stadium. Photo / Photosport
In his new weekly column The Clubrooms, Dylan Cleaver takes a closer look at the winners and losers from the sporting weekend - and everything in between.
DAVE RENNIE
The Wallabies got a classic New Coach Bounce. The All Blacks didn't (see below).
There is a school of thought that believes that because very few New Zealanders closely monitored, or even briefly tuned into, Super Rugby Australia, we under-estimated the potential of the Wallabies. There might be an element of truth to this but I don't think you can mount a serious argument against the fact there was a significant talent deficit on the green-and-gold side of the match programme.
That Australia didn't just match the All Blacks away from home but outplayed them for long periods hints at superior coaching and game planning.
The beauty is we don't have long to find out if it was a small bounce, or a "look out, the Wallabies are back" kind of bounce.
THE BLEDISLOE CUP (re Australian Rugby)
Man, did the grand old Bledisloe need that or what.
Despite the hype marketing and badge clutching, the contest for the Bledisloe Cup was starting to look as irrelevant as the time when the trophy went missing and nobody realised for years. It was eventually found in a storeroom in Melbourne, the rugby stronghold due west of Opunake.
The last thing the sport needed was the trophy to be locked away again after two weeks so worst-case scenario avoided.
Also, that last 10 minutes was outrageously good fun, with both teams eschewing simple opportunities to knock a little sand-wedged drop goal over the sticks.
The stage is set for a cracker at Eden Park.
THE NRL
A couple of sensational qualifying semifinals.
Canberra pipped the fast-finishing Roosters in a Friday night thriller before Souths pulled away late to add another year of futility to the Parramatta Eels honours board.
If you think Rieko Ioane woke up this morning feeling pretty sheepish, at least he (presumably) will get a chance to rescue his season. Parramatta playmaker Mitchell Moses on the other hand will relive his kick from in front that hit the upright for the rest of his days. What should have been 20-20 with 18 minutes to go instead turned into 18-26 with 17 to go.
The season effectively ended for the Eels there and then.
Great drama and a sobering reminder that sport can be cruel.
TAUPO ULTRA ORGANISERS
A shameless plug here, but no less well deserved.
It's been a brutally tough year for the sports events industry, just ask the organisers of the ASB Classic.
It's no different for those involved in more niche events, like the weekend's Taupo Ultramarathon. The owners of the event were waiting on tenterhooks to see if Auckland would join the rest of the country at Level One.
Previously they'd had a proposal to shift the dates to December rejected, so had decided to have the main field run on Saturday with Aucklanders running on Sunday, adding a level of complexity, cost and stress to the operation that would have tested the patience of saints.
Covid played ball just in time and the Sunday wasn't needed.
The Saturday was great though.
I lack the almost-religious fervour of many born-again joggers (shufflers) so I won't bore you with the details other than to say the Taupo Ultra is a fantastic event with different distances (24km, 50km, 74km and 100km) for different abilities, and trail running is a fantastically cheap and accessible way of seeing some of the best parts of the country.
IAN FOSTER
For perception's sake as much as anything, Foster needed a fast start. Instead, where the Wallabies got a New Coach Bounce the All Blacks got a New Coach Splat.
A draw might be better than a loss but it won't alter the way most rugby aficionados will view this match: the All Blacks badly fluffed their lines and were extremely lucky to take anything away from the test.
Another poor performance in Auckland and all those misgivings about the pre-ordained nature of the appointment process will rise to the surface again.
It cannot be easy for Foster. He is an experienced coach and has been around the game long enough to know that there is a significant portion of the public who think he is the wrong man at the wrong time. The first chance he had to silence the doubters could have gone worse, but not by much.
One week into a two-year tenure is ludicrously quick to be making snap judgements, but that's how it works with the All Blacks. You'd be naïve to think that this is not already looming as a big week for the coach.
RIEKO IOANE
There's two ways of looking at his clanger.
One, he was lazy.
Two, he was trying to look cool for the highlights package.
Pick your poison.
There was no excuse for dropping the ball over the line with nobody around. There was too much distance between then and the finish line to say it cost the All Blacks the match, but it certainly made it harder.
It was also a missed opportunity for Foster to stamp his mark on the environment with a bit of brimstone. Instead we got this rather wet response.
"He's a confident young man. He'll learn from that one thing but can also focus on a whole lot of other good things he did in that game too."
OK then.
THE CAKE TIN
The last time I frequented the place was not for a sporting event but even then I couldn't help but notice how dank and unloved it looked. It's only 21 years old but it feels like it belongs to a bygone era when spectators were the least important part of the stadium experience.
Wellingtonians have long since given up on attending matches there and while I don't necessarily blame them, the sight of empty yellow seats at an All Black test – the first test in the capital for 15 months – was fairly shocking.
WHITE FERNS
A calamitous tour to Australia was capped by a humbling 232-run loss in the final Rose Bowl one-day international.
The biggest issue is not so much the horribly lopsided result but the fact that it appears the two teams are playing different sports.
Too many of the White Ferns play a brand of gentle cricket that is increasingly obsolete. New Zealand Cricket needs a complete rethink of their development strategies for the women's high-performance game.
At a generous estimate the White Ferns are about five years behind Australia and the gap is widening at an alarming rate.
Jesse Ryder is oft considered the biggest waste of sporting talent this country has produced. Agree or disagree? Who else would you include on your all-time list of misused, wasted or unfulfilled New Zealand sporting talent? Kelly Exelby, Tauranga
This is a great question with all kinds of tentacles. My thinking around Ryder has softened over the years. I used to get irrationally angry about his failure to knuckle down and apply himself and may have even written a fairly vicious (regrettable?) column to this effect.
Perhaps I used to take it personally that the guy had all the talent most of us clubbies would have given three toes for but seemed intent on pissing it up against a wall.
At some point, I realised Ryder had an illness that he wasn't equipped to deal with on his own and that perhaps it was a minor miracle he'd done what he'd done in cricket as, essentially, an alcoholic.
As much as you can argue that his talent was wasted, you could argue that not many people who live their illness out in the public eye leave the sport with a test average of 40, 25 first-class centuries and some of the more sublime innings we've seen from a New Zealand left-hander. Yeah, we'll always wonder what might have been (he's still only 36), but the truth is what-might-have-been could have also been a big fat zero.
That brings me to the second part of your question.
It's easy to look at the flameouts, the ones who like Ryder killed their careers in a blaze of headlines. You'd put Zac Guildford and Sione Faumuina it that category of those who dealt with addictions while trying to maintain a high-performance career, and Keith Murdoch, who was mentioned in dispatches last week.
There are those who were unquestionably mistreated, like one-test wonder Rodney Redmond and boxer Jimmy Peau.
There are obviously brilliant talents who were robbed of complete careers by injury or illness, like Jasin Goldsmith, Shane Bond and Ken Wadsworth.
One of the biggest hard-luck stories was brilliant backstroker Gary Hurring whose peak coincided with the 1980 Olympic boycott. Four years later he was past his peak but still managed a fourth and fifth in Los Angeles.
People sometimes label Michael Campbell an underachiever, but that's bollocks. He won and contended in huge golf tournaments while having none of the advantages of the American country club set. If anything, the three other guys on that winning Eisenhower trophy team probably under-achieved, but all had varying and justified reasons for not reaching the professional pinnacle.
So to narrow it down to one is near impossible and probably unfair.
If you're remotely familiar with my work you will know this is a subject close to my heart.
If you scratch the surface I imagine there are multiple lower-profile college football programmes with similarly troubling back stories.
ANORAK STAND
Since the start of Wimbledon 2003 there have been 69 grand slam tennis tournaments.
Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have won 57 of them between them, an extraordinarily prolonged three-headed era of domination that will never be seen again.
In that time, only two players have won multiple slams, Stan Wawrinka and Andy Murray with three apiece, though Marat Safin won the second of his two in 2005 (his first came in 2000).
Keep an eye out this week for Major League Baseball's American League championship series between the Houston Astros and Tampa Bay Rays. Game 2 is tomorrow at 9am, with times to be confirmed later for game 3 on Wednesday.
The Rays have one of the smallest fan bases and markets in baseball but have just knocked off the New York Yankees. The Astros are a big-market bully and the most hated sports franchise in America after using an elaborate sign-stealing system to cheat their way to a World Series.
It's David v Goliath.
It's the first time in six years that Penrith has made the trip to Auckland.