When victory ...
Look, there are a couple of reasons to be happy(ish) about Australia winning yet another Cricket World Cup.
One is that captain Pat Cummins, apart from being a magnificent fast bowler and a dashingly handsome human being, really appears to be a decent fellow.
The other is that India did not win.
Why not us? Why not, I don’t know, Afghanistan?
From the cricket to the netball to endless Olympic disciplines like swimming — but not rugby league or (ha ha, imagine it) rugby union — we hear Advance Australia Fair far too much.
Sport is about passion and positivity, yes. But it can also be darn annoying when success, fairly or otherwise, is earned by a team or an athlete who grinds your gears.
Which got me thinking.
... leaves sour taste
If Australia winning another Cricket World Cup is sort of a 12 out of 20 on an arbitrary annoyance scale, what would rate higher?
My list in ascending order:
14/20: The Melbourne Storm winning another NRL title. Cheats. Simple as that. The most unlikable team in Australia. And here I will point out my club, the mighty Penrith Panthers, are back-to-back-to-back champions.
15/20: Novak Djokovic winning another tennis major. Weird and arrogant and vaccine-hesitant. Will never get the adulation of Federer or Nadal or Serena.
16/20: The Dunedin club winning the club rugby banner. I don’t really have a dog in the fight now that my Pirates club is out of the premier ranks. But come on, nobody likes Dunedin. Blame Paul Dwyer.
17/20: England winning the Rugby World Cup. Men’s or women’s. Grim rugby.
18/20: The New York Yankees winning the World Series. Sorry, former Highlanders coach and massive Yankees fan Tony Brown.
19/20: Manchester City winning 10 Premier League titles in a row. Could happen. But, oh, the schadenfreude when they finally get busted for rorting the system and get stripped of all those trophies.
And finally, at a rating of about 435,000 out of 20: The Crusaders. The day I celebrate the Crusaders winning a raffle, let alone another Super Rugby title, is the day you need to order a toxicology report on "The Last Word" because clearly the author is not thinking straight.
Too much cricket
Four days.
Yep. Just four days after the Aussies spanked the Indians in the Cricket World Cup final, the countries were clashing in a T20 series.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Story of the year
You really need to get excited about Southern United, and you need to get excited now.
It almost seems unreal that they are playing in the National League final at Mt Smart Stadium tomorrow afternoon.
Football faces so many obstacles — lack of comparative resources being No 1, as well as the historic difficulty in dealing with Auckland-centric administration — down this end of the country.
That a team based in Dunedin has performed so brilliantly at a national level, and is a goal or two away from a championship, is cause for massive celebration.
My congratulations to Rose Morton and Kris Ridley and team. Objectivity be damned — go, you good Southern things, go.
Speaking of football, I’m not going to get too excited just yet about the arrival of a second A-League club in New Zealand.
Billionaire boss Bill Foley is talking up his investment but starting a club from scratch, and getting a famously apathetic city to support it, will not be easy.
Local heroes
Great to see a smiling Emma Gilmour and a thriving Ben Campbell in the news recently.
Gilmour, recovering from her horror crash in Sardinia, has really had an extraordinary couple of years and it remains very cool that a Dunedin driver became the first woman to drive fulltime for the glamour McLaren team.
As for Ben Campbell, well, success on the golf course could not have happened to a nicer guy.
Campbell had the biggest day of his career with victory at the Hong Kong Open, and followed it with third at the Indonesian Masters.
He has always had the talent but has been held back by injury. Fit and firing, he is a legitimate star.
Teeing off
You would not see Ben Campbell acting like this.
Dutch golfer Joost Luiten went viral this week when he was filmed losing three of his clubs up a tree at the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.
Yes, three.
A frustrated Luiten threw his driver at a tree. It got stuck. He threw another in an attempt to dislodge the driver. Stuck. He had one more go . .. and got stuck again.
A to Z
Thirty days till Christmas!
I will again be doing an A to Z of the sporting year — focusing on the quirky, the forgotten, the scandalous — so please send me your ideas. Especially for X, Y and Z. Dreadful letters.
