OPINION:
Another week, another Aotearoawash of Super Rugby results.
That's 10-0 with an aggregate of New Zealand 416 plays Australia 214.
It's a blow-out, right? Confirmation of our worst prejudices – that the competition would be non-competitive and that Australia cannot sustain five professional Super Rugby franchises.
Those prejudices worked on me. After indulging in a boatload of footy in week one, I gave it an air-shot over the weekend, not because I'd suddenly fallen out with the sport but simply because the results felt pre-ordained and that isn't very interesting.
Australia's collective uselessness had chased me away, but maybe I was looking at Super Rugby TT through the wrong lens.
It might in fact be the idea that parity in sport is inherently good that needs challenging. As a sage said to me this weekend as I dismissed the tournament as a flop: "Someone's always got to finish last".
Simplistic, yes, but not without merit. If you cast your eyes around the world, it doesn't take long to realise that in many of the most-watched leagues in the world, it's the same select few that always win.
Take football's Premier League and La Liga. At the start of each respective season, the footballing publics of England and Spain understand that only three or four teams in each league have a realistic chance of winning the title.
The leagues are plutocratic, yet fans of the have-nots build their hopes and dreams around parallel narratives, like avoiding relegation and, if everything goes well, qualifying for Europe.
When the "impossible" happens and a team like Leicester City wins the title, it creates such an explosion of goodwill that the story is amplified beyond a mere upset victory.
Perhaps those are the moments we should live for as fans of sport, not the ideal of "anybody can win on any day".
The brilliant Drive to Survive Netflix series has demonstrated that there are richer stories to be told at the back of the Formula One grid these days, rather than the boring Mercedes end.
Even in highly regulated leagues where parity is engineered with blunt instruments such as salary caps, luxury taxes, and worst-to-first draft picks, some teams and franchises seems more naturally attuned to the high life, others to the basement.
As one example, the Lakers and Clippers share Los Angeles, but only one franchise has won a bunch of titles. That's a storyline right there: the Clippers' perennial struggle to wrest the west from its closest rivals.
Haplessness and mediocrity are just as important to a league as pre-eminence. They can't survive without them.
So we're stuck in the midst of a tournament where all the mediocrity and haplessness resides on the left side of the Tasman.
Perhaps we need to embrace it and live for the upset.
It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the Reds could beat the Chiefs in Townsville this weekend.
And if I try hard enough to continue this thought exercise that possibility might almost be enough to get excited about… almost.
Winners
Phil Mickelson
Known affectionately as Lefty, Phil Mickelson once went by the more pejorative nickname FIGJAM, of which the final five letters stand for "… I'm Good, Just Ask Me". It came, according to the venerable Golf Digest, from his early days on tour when his cockiness rubbed the veterans up the wrong way.
These days he's seen as one of the elder statesmen on the tour, the sort the younger golfers look up to. That's a natural progression, what is less so is winning a major tournament at the age of 50 on the longest course in major history, a setup that was expected to favour the younger, bigger-hitting pros.
Chalk one up for the not-so-humble old guy.
Warriors
Speaking of the sort of mediocrity that makes a competition tick, we come to the Warriors, a team that celebrated years of non-achievement with its "Keep the Faith" mantra, a line so lethargic is should have been followed with "With a Bit of Luck We'll Make the Playoffs" in parentheses.
While nobody is going to get carried away with a four-point victory over strugglers Wests, particularly when they did their best to give it away at the death, there is reason to think they may have won the lottery by getting the signature of Reece Walsh.
While the playmaker will feel he should have done better in defence when Wests opened the scoring, it was pretty hard to find fault with anything he did with the ball in the hand.
He's a keeper.
Scott Dixon
Just another pole at Indianapolis to add to the CV. Yes, it guarantees nothing – Dixon has been in the box seat four times but through a mixture of bad luck and questionable strategy, has won just one Indy 500 – but it is remarkable how he manages to keep the young brigade at bay.
Australian rugby
Yeah I know, I spent the first few hundred words toying with the idea that parity is overrated. I might just about believe it but my word, SRTT must be a hard watch if you're an Ocker.
While it is true that nobody has enjoyed the long flight to Perth, you suspect they'll be exposed on Friday in Wellington against, according to Super Rugby Aotearoa form, New Zealand's worst team.
The most surprising flub has been Brad Thorn's Reds, who've concede 103 points across two matches, something that must hurt the former All Black to the core.
Leicester City
I'm sure most Leicester fans would take the FA Cup over a fourth-place finish in the league but still, the way they have fallen out of the Champions League places for two seasons running must be particularly painful.
On this occasion they had only themselves to blame, leading 2-1 at home against a poor Tottenham side before completely muffing the last 20 minutes, highlighted by the keeper punching one into his own net on route to a 2-4 loss.
Leicester spent 242 days ensconced in the top four, but dipped out on the day that mattered most.
Louis Oosthuizen
He's not really a loser, not unless you're of the old school that states second place is first loser.
Oosthuizen is a fantastic golfer with a swing that seems almost as laidback as compatriot Ernie Els' was in his heyday. Like Els, Oosthuizen is putting together a formidable CV of runners-up finishes in majors. With today's result, he now has five to Els' six. The only difference is Els won four of the big tournaments; the 2010 open Championship remains Oosthuizen's only crown.
This is an amalgam of a couple of emails that essentially posited the same question: "Is David Kirk going to end up on the right side of history again in regards to his opposition to the Silver Lake equity stake in New Zealand Rugby?"
This is a very tough question to answer because at the moment we have something of an irresistible-force-meets-immovable-object deadlock in the battle between the players, who Kirk represents as chairman of their union, and New Zealand Rugby.
Kirk was the first player to declare that he wouldn't be joining the 1986 Cavaliers, a rebel tour to apartheid South Africa arranged after an injunction prevented an "official" All Blacks team touring the previous year.
While falling short of pariah status, history has not looked kindly upon the Cavaliers. Kirk's reputation, by contrast, was burnished by his refusal, even if it meant he was disliked, intensely in some cases, by large sections of the rugby community.
Kirk's fight is different this time. At the very least he opposes the way NZ Rugby stitched the Silver Lake deal together. He believes there are better alternatives that will keep the All Blacks in New Zealand hands, including one brokered by Forsyth Barr, of which he is conveniently chairman.
I'm not going to call a winner at this point but will look on interested as Kirk, for the second time, finds himself at the nexus of one of the most critical junctures in New Zealand rugby history.
A good week in sport for the Beeb last week, which is kind of just as well because they had a shocker on the Royal Family front. These retrospectives look at an agonising last five minutes of the 2000-01 Bundesliga for Schalke 04 fans, and go even further back to recall the time one of the world's greatest players signed for… Dunstable Town.
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