OPINION
Chris Rattue runs through the best and worst from the sporting weekend.
WINNER/LOSER: The Warriors/Golden Point
First, to get this off the chest.
The NRL’s golden point system to break deadlocks is a tacky lottery. I really hate it.
Chris Rattue’s Winners and Losers: The best Warriors team I’ve seen
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Warriors player celebrate with Shaun Johnson after he kicked the winning field goal against the Sharks. Photosport
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That they are quite commonplace during the regular season also means that playoff deadlock-breakers don’t seem quite so special and dramatic anymore.
But the extra-time fluff does throw up exciting finishes, if mad rule-bypassing scrambles are your thing.
And the Warriors came out on the good side of the ledger, with Shaun Johnson’s winning field goal against Canberra in the latest NRL round.
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It had been a stunning game of ebb and flow, and a nail-biting draw would have been a perfectly good result.
Significantly, the Warriors’ best players made sure they were involved in the final, winning play.
Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad, Tohu Harris and Addin Fonua-Blake set the field goal position up.
The latter two have amazing footwork for forwards.
WINNER: The Warriors (again)
This is, quite easily, the best Warriors team I’ve seen. There have been a couple of good ones in the past, but there was always fragility beneath the previous success.
The current mob oozes class and true, deep-seated NRL elite quality. The Warriors club, finally, is set up to linger near the top of the table, and regularly press for titles.
WINNER: Erika Fairweather
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There’s no tougher women’s swim field than the 400m freestyle and Dunedin’s Erika Fairweather has made herself at home among superstars Ariarne Titmus, Katie Ledecky and Summer McIntosh.
A bronze medal wouldn’t normally qualify for gold in this column. But Fairweather became just the fifth woman in history to record a sub-four minute time, after her phenomenal World Aquatics Championship performance in Japan.
WINNER: Strikers... when they score
Football Fern Hannah Wilkinson attracted most of the attention after her Fifa World Cup winner against group opponents Norway.
But she’d had an average game up to that point.
Wilkinson scored the goal that counted, and her name is now etched in New Zealand sport lore, a la that of Winston Reid, whose last-gasp goal against Slovakia secured New Zealand’s first-ever senior World Cup finals point in 2010.
Wilkinson’s strike from close range at Eden Park is being lauded, while the great lead-up work from Jacqui Hand and others was celebrated in small print.
That’s sport.
It’s like all the rugby first fives who win man-of-the-match awards on the back of other, far more meritorious contributions.
As for the player to impress this pundit most in the Norway victory: midfielder Malia Steinmetz.
WINNER: Jitka Klimkova.
The Football Ferns were set up superbly for the Norway game. Coach Klimkova - under pressure after a poor lead-up - came up trumps.
But there is still plenty of work to do, starting with the Philippines match tonight. The euphoria of the Norway victory made it easy to forget that this is a tournament, where things can go badly wrong for any team.
I know that the Football Ferns’ pre-tournament work included a game against a young men’s side that was asked to play in a certain way, to mimic how the Philippines are expected to operate.
LOSER: Michael Vaughan
The former England cricket captain has taken bad losing to comical levels.
After Australia retained the Ashes when bad weather curtailed the fourth test, Vaughan reckoned the victors were “timid, scared and petrified” of this England team.
Doesn’t sound like any Aussie cricketers most of us know.
WINNER/LOSER: Brian Harman
The American scored a shock victory in golf’s British Open, which reminded me of interviewing Kiwi golfer Michael Hendry this year.
Hendry, recovering from a cancer scare, played in a group with Harman at a British Open and described him as “one of the most awful humans I’ve ever met”.
Hendry was particularly incensed over the way Harman and his caddy had treated course volunteers.
WINNER: Ryan Fox
One of 12 players to make the cut in all four golf majors this year, earning himself US$428,122 ($690,943) across the four events. The stocky Kiwi is a bit up and down, but he’s had some great rounds in the big events.
