It’s been about four years since I started road tripping down to the Waikato most winter weekends to watch rugby league. It started as an itch I wanted to scratch, to watch a game in my old hometown of Rāhui Pōkeka. But it quickly turned into something else – a love affair.
Why is playing cricket left handed even allowed? It’s a pain in the arse for all concerned. But especially for fast bowlers.
You can’t get a jaffa soda in a glass bottle at Davies Park anymore. Or anywhere else for that matter. But thanks to some generous, big hearted and dedicated people, you can still go to Davies Park and taste that flavour.
Lots of people think Ministry of Works slacker culture died when the infamous government department was privatised, deunionised, dehumanised and transformed into a model of neoliberal pothole-filling success in 1988. Not so. It lives on in organised cricket.
T20 cricket sucks. It’s cricket dumbed down. Americanised. Pandering to the Average Joe sport fan with a shorter attention span than a deranged fruit fly. It’s simply not cricket.
The positioning of third man isn’t just the difference between winning and losing. It’s much more than that. It’s the key to everything.
Last Monday, and probably every other day, a local shopkeeper saw a group of people hobbling gingerly through her West Coast town of Karamea at a glacially slow pace.
How do people react when the world is relentlessly beating them down again and again and again and again without any gaps for oxygen?
It had been 14 long years since Tūrangawaewae Rugby League Sports and Cultural Club last defeated Taniwharau - in the 2006 Waikato Rugby League Grand Final.
When you turn up at a random club cricket match, there are an endless array of possibilities for what you might be fortunate enough to witness. You’ll always see something, even if it’s a whole lot of nothing to the uninitiated.
The Fox and the Crow 