The Dropkicks: A sports blog and pocast

I've just received word from one of my mates about a shocking development that will change the way security systems in this country operate. He set out to test security at the offices of the Sunday Star Times and I've got to say I'm quite alarmed with the results.

He went into the building concealing a toy grenade and shotgun, and not one person caught him.

He even placed the grenade on his lap at one stage, in plain view, and nobody cared. This comes ahead of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, where journalists will be attending matches and if one of them is to come to harm it will affect deadlines all around the country.

He managed to gain access to several restricted areas, speak briefly to sport editor Michael Donaldson in the kitchen, scab some lose change from Finlay MacDonald and got within metres of the desk of sports journalist Richard Boock before being asked to make someone else a cuppa.

When Donaldson was contacted for comment he originally declined, but in a later written statement had this to say:

We at the noble SST are not concerned by the holes in security brought to light by your investigation. We do not believe we will be targeted by gunmen. Because we don't publish Chris Rattue's articles.

Needless to say, these developments are likely to change the industry. It will now be completely unacceptable for a journalist to go anywhere without at least four armed guards and the SST themselves are installing a $3.2m security system to detect fake weapons.

I've always tried to be pretty positive when I've put things up here unless they're about Robbie Deans or Chris Rattue. But it's impossible for me to say one good thing about this game.

I'm a casual basketball fan. I support the Cavs and Golden State, I check the scores, that's it. I'll watch the games every so often, but I don't follow it nearly as closely as NFL or rugby union. I bought this game at the recommendation of a good friend who is a lot more into basketball than I am after hearing him rave on and on and on about the My Player mode, which is gonna be the majority of what I write about in this review.

As Hadyn will be able to attest, I like to feel like I'm in a sport game, like I was the one who caused that 60yd TD pass to Andre Johnson. So My Player in 2K10 seemed like a perfect fit for me.

It's a concept you all will have encountered. Create a digital likeness of yourself [which ends up looking nothing like yourself], assign it a position, and hit play. This one's a little more in depth, with a whole host of options - you can customise shoes, and choose from [at a guess] more than 50 different shooting styles for each kind of shot you can pull off - running shots, fadeaways, stationary jumpers and the different varities of layups and dunks.

Once you've finished mucking around with this for half an hour or so, you'll go to Summer League. Here you've got to 'prove yourself' by performing key roles of your position correctly - getting assists, rebounds, blocks, steals, filling lanes, boxing out, screening properly, taking good shots [the game actually penalises you for taking bad shots, even if they go in]. You'll have a letter grade assigned to you and this will fluctuate depending on your performance. After 6 games of this and you'll either get sent to the D-League [the Heartland Championship of the NBA] or taken on by an NBA team for a Training Camp.

After this was when things went poorly for me. In my first career I managed to play 83 games in the D-League [on 12m quarters] before I found out online my career had glitched out and no matter what I did I wouldn't get called up to the NBA. On top of this, you'll find lots of weird things happening - players get stuck in a running animation when inbounding the ball, offensive and defensive players camp in the lane with no-one around them for no reason, your players will post screens metres away from players rendering them useless and cheerleaders can get stuck on the court for minutes at a time.

By far the most annoying thing though is that this game cheats. This isn't just that I'm a bad player, I've tested this theory for weeks. The game favours the home team, and tries all it can to let them win. I've raced away to a 20pt lead in the first quarter before playing away. All of a sudden, my team started missing wide open jump shots. And wide open fastbreak dunks/layups. My player, with a 99 overall 3pt, mid-range, shoot in traffic and shoot off dribble rating couldn't hit stationary mid-range shots after making several over 2 defenders earlier in one particular game. I tried it outside of My Player too - Cavs at GSW. The Cavs should win that match by 30+ in real life, but we won by 6. This was with Shaq missing 5 open dunks, and LBJ and Mo missing 12 [!] open mid-range jumpers. It's fucking annoying as hell, especially when the game gives you requirements such as meeting a certain shooting % in a game/over the season. And some of those requirements are stupid too - like limiting Carmelo Anthony to 2pts over the course of a game. Or when the '2K Insider' - kind of like a mentor to your player - tells you teams want to trade you, but there's nowhere to select this. There's also no way to request to trade teams, you're stuck with whoever you sign with. And the game makes stupid trades - like trading KG and Paul Pierce from the Celtics for Boris Diaw of the Bobcats.

I've never, ever seen so much hatred poured towards a game online, considering 2K/NBA Live fanboys are like PS3/360 fanboys in that they will usually support their chosen product 'til death do they part. You can find their outpourings here and more specifically the My Player problems here including where I asked for help. Or just check out the hundreds of videos on YouTube.

What makes matters worse is that 2K have promised a patch to fix most things, but it's not come out, even though the game's been out for 5 months.

Quite frankly, this game is utter shit. Even the 'party' modes such as the dunk contest glitch out - pulling the same dunk in two separate dunk comps [not rounds] with the same player and props gave a very different score. Glitches make it impossible to play, and it's more frustrating that enjoyable. Unless something picks up for 2K11, I won't be buying it. And in any case, I'll be waiting months and checking online before I do. Don't even buy this second hand, trust me.

The assist is a recorded statistic in several sports - football, ice hockey, baseball and basketball. The assist is a way of showing that a player may not score a lot of the time, but always do their best to try and help their team win.

I think it should come in to rugby.

I mean, think about it. There are so many times when a player will stitch up the defence, then offload or pass to that final guy who gets the try. While he'll be happy just to get some points on the board, the guy who made the try doesn't actually get any recognition barring a drink at the pub later in the evening, if he's lucky.

Yet there are players who excel at finding the open man in broken play, or slicing through the line to set up others. Conrad Smith barely ever gets tries, but think how many times he's set up Ma'a Nonu, Cory Jane, Hosea Gear, David Smith and Tamati Ellison. How often does Dan Carter scythe through the opposition to hand the ball off to a rampaging forward?

In many instances in broken play, all the player has had to do is catch the ball and fall over, while the player who set up the try may have eluded or broken multiple tackles and for this he gets no recognition.

Introducing the assist wouldn't be hard, though I think that the basketball model should be adjusted to rugby - the football version wouldn't work because it's so easy to win a penalty in rugby and often it has nothing to do with the work of the ball carrier, and the NHL model would be impossible to explain to audiences.

Thoughts?

Check out what's on http://www.superrugby.co.nz at the moment. They've got the right culprit, but I think the jail term might be wrong... They are of course referring to Lauaki's suspension for a dangerous tackle, but the wording of this is incredibly unfortunate.

Also, I'm gonna blow my own trumpet.

Apologies for the lateness of this week's entry, and lacdk of action over the past week. I know it's a shame, but I have a life and it gets in the way sometimes.

First up we've got our first-ever entry from our Blues fan, boomshanka.

The horror... of being a Blues supporter.
Every week I don't know what team I'll be supporting - sensible Dr Jekyll or sinister Mr Hyde?
On Saturday both personalities came out from under the turf and reared their heads, Dr Jekyll in the first half, Mr Hyde in the second. Don't get me wrong, Mr Hyde can produce some amazing rugby - unfortunately on Saturday he produced it and then handed it to the Crusaders. From that moment/pass, the game was lost.
Where Pat Lam goes from here is anyones guess. He has a team lacking in experience and leadership - especially in the backline; which is where the Blues of old have produced there most scintillating rugby. He has a team that had its scrum disemboweled on a couple of occasions in the second half. He has a team that could only produce one try, which was opportunistic.
Unfortunately there is not a happy ending to the story - "Realizing he will soon be Hyde forever, he commits suicide by poison".
Don't drink the cool-ade Rudi.

Next up, as always, Chiefs fan Richard Irvine. Forgive him if he's a bit grumpy, it's not easy losing to the Reds and the Aussies in one week.

Was thinking about just doing a three word review: 'This is typical.' All of a sudden my polly-anna-ish optimism at the start of the season is blown away by some sloppy tackling and lack of concentration. I can't do a proper review of the game, I was fishing on Friday, and wallked into a bar in Whangarei to catch the Chiefs mess up an attacking lineout down their end in the last couple of minutes. Not long after than, the bar was empty. Welcome to Whangarei.

Fuck it anyway, Chiefs are all about coming from behind, backs to the wall, not leading the cometition start to finish. It's just not our way, this could be just what we need, he says chewing his knuckle. We might get a bit more of what we need against the Crusaders on Friday too, if we're not careful.

Our Crusaders fan, and Zac Guildford's hair stylist, is living it up, since she supports the only NZ team which won this round.

The champion team the Crusaders are was shown on Saturday night in their game against the Blues. Other than winning the whole competition, it doesn’t get any better than when we beat the bunch of Jafa’s! There is just something extra special when we kick their stuck-up asses into the ground. For those of you who don’t understand, the Crusaders beating the Blues is the equivalent of the All Blacks beating Australia. When we beat the ‘Canes, Highlanders or any other team it is just another win that eventually equates to the Crusaders living on top of the table with the Super Rugby Title...again. But beating the Blues is another story... it just feels so satisfying.

It was a fairly balanced game between the two sides, particularly in the first half. I was getting, I’ll admit it, a little nervous during the first half. This half ended with the Crusaders one point ahead, 16-15. Things changed when two of the youngins of the team, Ryan Crotty and Robert Fruean, both crossed the try line early-ish in the second half. This made the Crusaders up 33-15, and me loudly confident. The game ended up 33-20, the Crusaders unfortunately not getting the bonus point I was wishing for.

Not only did we thrash the Blues, the almighty Crusaders were the only New Zealand team to WIN a game in Round Four. Yes. I know you’re thinking it, the Crusaders are amazing. You are correct.

All Crusaders had a good game. I don’t have a standout player for the week. Carter controlled the game wonderfully at #10 and, once again, Andy Ellis supported him well. I think the combination of these two is a real asset to the Crusaders team. Without a doubt the best 9/10 combination, I’m going to go with, in the world. Also, God (Richie) returned on the starting line up and was as always super! The Crusaders have finally hit their stride in the competition. Next week we are playing the Chiefs. However, we are unfortunately not playing in Christchurch where the crowd was 23,000 strong this week. Not going to be any home team advantage for us this week. Predictions for round five: Crusaders win, easily, obviously.

Which means now it's my turn to write about the not-so-mighty Hurricanes.

I truly believed [and still do] that this is our year. It has to be! We were supposed to have an undefeated season. Well that's out the window now, but we can still win the whole thing.

I got up at 5.30 to catch the Cheetahs game, and had to endure a few excruciatingly painful minutes of the Stormers/Highlanders game. Threw on my two-year-old 'Canes jersey, downed a Red Bull, turned on the telly. Things started well, with a move we've used a lot seeing Jane slot in as something of a second centre, drawing in the D, then flicking it off to David Smith. Things were sweet, this was gonna be a cakewalk. Ok, we missed a couple of penalties. And the Cheetahs got them from further out. Whatever, we'll come out and blow them away in the second half.

Or not.

What stood out for me in this match was the quiet a game Ma'a Nonu and Alipati Leaua had. Nonu took a while to even get anything going, and it made me wonder why he and Conrad are so active, but as soon as Conrad or Tamati aren't in at centre, everything just dies. All good. Stormers this week, who should be Schalk-less after he hit the ref. Cakewalk.

Last but certainly not least, bleary-eyed Highlanders fan Jimmy.

I suspect that my hopes for success may have been a little misplaced when I last wrote. Oh how this rollercoaster plummets to horrid lows.

While the scoreline doesn't reflect the effort that was being put in by the Highlanders, it does indicate that they really struggled to make much of an impact.

Probably the biggest problem was winning lineout ball off their own throw. Too many opportunities were lost to mistakes in that area.  The highlanders were able to secure 2nd and 3rd phase ball often enough, but just didn't seem to know what to do with it.

Anyway the most memorable part of the game (given they couldn't score points) was Jimmy Cowan's munted little finger. Ouchy ouch ouch ouch. It looked as though each individual joint was dislocated and must have hurt like anything. Unfortunately that means no Jimmy this week against the Bulls which I suspect means a probable thrashing.

When do we get to play an easy team like the Force or something? I want that winning feeling again.

Rugby Review is a new series debuting for The Dropkicks. Put simply, it's a way of following a team through the fans eyes. Are Crusaders fans really one-eyed? Have Highlanders fans lost all hope? You'll follow the team through 5 fans. I'm looking for someone to do the

Blues each week, so please leave a comment if you want to do this!

The Chiefs: By long-time friend of The Dropkicks, Richard Irvine

John Mitchell talks you through the Chiefs vs Western Force.

G'day. I'm John Mitchell. You may remember me from 'sitting next to Clive Woodward like a sack of wet sand' and 'I can't believe the All Black coach hasn't been sacked yet!'. That one came out in 2003. So the Chiefs played the Force on Saturday night; I have fond memories of Waikato and the Chiefs - I had hair then - so I want to see them do well. On the other hand, the Force are a pack of whinging little bitches, and I want to see their hearts ripped out, piled on the 22, then set on fire.

Just joking!

Luckily, the Chiefs came to the party and bitchslapped them. Good one. If those Aussies hadn't gone all Lord Of The Flies on me, they'd be the fucking Crusaders by now. I think the lesson in this match is "This is what happens when you fuck Mitch in the arse". For the Chiefs, who are three from three, I think the lesson is "Watch your back" - life plays some fucked up hands, and just when your career is going great, there are ALWAYS people out there wanting to stick a knife in your back. Always. Take it from Mitch, I know.

The Crusaders by Ti'i Paulo's 'special nutritionist' As predicted, it was a good week for the Crusaders. They played the Sharks, at home, on Friday night and I was much more pleased by their performance. The Crusaders had not been defeated by a South African Super Rugby team at home since 1996, and I was glad to see this remain.

The game was light-years better than last week’s game, against the Reds. There wasn’t anything overly spectacular about the game. It was just a good game of rugby. It was such a massive improvement, it was like watching a completely different team!

As I have left this review to the last minute, I’m just going to sum up the Crusaders' ROUND THREE

Richie, AKA God, is back.

Outstanding scrums.

Up at half time: Ten – Six.

Never would've known we lost so badly last week.

Dan Carter overtook Matt Burke on the all-time Super rugby scorer’s list. (Now 3rd)

Thirty five – Six: Final Score.

Hottie, Zac Guildford: Multiple tries. One intercept try.

Runaway ending. Two tries in 10minutes.

Epically annihilating tackles.

Exceptional crowd attendance.

I'm looking forward to much of the same in Round Four.

Hurricanes, by me

King Carlos came to town and he brought the Clever kid. 'Los didn't do a hell of a lot - and got a lot of sledging thrown his way from those in the crowd - and I'm not sure what people expected him to do anyway. Lining up outside it looked like there'd be an amazing crowd - it took us 20m to get in in the first place. But it wasn't. It was an ok crowd, but surely not much more than 16,000.

If you could look up the Hurricanes on unencyclopedia, this would be the match that accompanied it, with this blurb.

The Hurricanes are a team based in Wellington, New Zealand. They play their home games at the Biscuit Tin. The Hurricanes have historically been a team with a lot of promising talent, but often that talent has been squandered in favour of white line fever. This sports team simply refuses to learn the basics, opting instead for flashy, 50/50 ball play [which is more often than not 20/80].

The February 27, 2010 match against the Lions was the personification of this. The Lions were not fancied to win this game, as they have been shown to have a weak defence. The Hurricanes decided to exploit this by trying to set up 60m solo tries, instead of getting the team to work together to get 4 quick tries - securing a bonus point - and then resort to flashy football.

We're off to South Africa for three weeks, minus Conrad and Tamati this week, and the Pig for a season.

Oh, and can I say the Seal Slayer's try against the Lions was amazing and hilarious. Best bit of rugby satire I've ever seen.

The Highlanders, by Jimmy. 

This game is the first one this year that's highlighted what for me is the major deficiency of "Super" rugby. Waking up at 4am on a Sunday is hard. You might wonder why I was waking up at 4am? Well, try as I might I just couldn't find a replay of the game being shown at a reasonable hour on Sunday. There were replays of the Crusaders' game, which you may recall was played at NZ time, and replays of the Blues' game which finished well before midnight. So someone at Sky clearly doesn't think anyone wants to watch the Highlanders play at a normal time of the day.*

The scheduling of the kickoff in the afternoon can't have helped either, it would have made more sense to have a night game in Africa, which I think could have been 6:30am here in New Zealand. These crazy time zone differences are why I got really excited by the idea of changing Super rugby to being more of a Champions League type competition, which would help to limit the amount of time players have to spend miles away from home. That, or just ditching the Africans from the competition and playing with Pacific and Asian teams; though I suppose that would probably kill the presumably big earner of the Tri-Nations.

Anyway, all of that is by the by, because I haven't been asked to deliver a state of the Union, but rather a fan's perspective of Highlanders games, so I should probably crack into it. The Highlanders won!!! I don't think they won pretty, and maybe they were robbed of a bonus point, but bagging 4 points in Africa is a big achievement at any stage; even if the win is agains the Cheetahs who apparantely haven't won back to back since they returned to the comp.

I couldn't believe the investment the Highlanders were making in Hobbs when they have Robbie Robinson in the squad, but the guy has sure proven me wrong. He's put in solid performances in the first 3 rounds, and scored 4 tries to boot. I think the balance of the team with Shoemark at 12 (surely he's more natural there than at centre, what with his good kicking game?) and Lynn at 13 was great. As awesome as Jayden Hayward can be, I think he's a little too inconsistent at this level yet, and having a relative veteran like Shoemark outside Hobbs must surely be a calming influence on him.

However, I also liked the tactic of bringing Berquist on at the end to calm the tempo and keep the Cheetahs pushed back in their own half - that backline trio might be a good starting trio against some of the teams that can control their game better than the Cheetahs. Then you can bring Lynn on for Berquist and push Hobbs in one to up the tempo in the last 30 minutes.

Having praised the win, I did have some questions about the tactics the backs employed a lot of the night. It doesn't seem to me that the new rules make kicking possession away constantly a good idea. While Ben Smith had a great Air NZ Cup campaign last year, that hasn't yet translated into Super 14 form, so putting bombs up constantly basically means only Dagg is going to be able to get up in the air & compete for the ball. Dagg by the way, had a reasonably good game, especially with the added responsibility of having the goal kicking duties.

My only other comment on the backs, is that Jimmy Cowan had, by his standards, an average game. A couple of kicks went awry and he just wasn't his usual sharp and decisive self. Jimmy is awesome, and not just because he shares my name. I think its great how he shook off all of that (admittedly fairly self-inflicted) crap, and has really stood up and made the most of the opportunities he's had. Here's hoping he's back to his best next week, because the Highlanders need him at top form.

The forwards had solid games for the most part - I don't think they were being out-scrummed, but rather that the referee was allowing some fairly iffy tactics from the Cheetahs front row. The loose forwards were solid, and though Thompson looked a bit out of place at times at No 8, I like the additional pace that the trio had. Up against Smith & Broussow I think the really held their own. Its interesting how the effectiveness of Broussow has been nullified by the new rules - last year he might have earnt his team 10 penalties from his efforts at the breakdown, but now with the law being interpreted correctly (ok, differently) he had a quiet game.

Apart that is, from scoring the first of 3 tries to be sent to the TMO, and the one that I thought was the most obviously not a try. The ball hit the ground, but to my eyes at least he had clearly lost control of it prior to that. Smith's try I would have given the benefit of the doubt to, even though you couldn't actually see it hitting the ground - but the 'daylight' between ball and line for Thompson's disallowed try wasn't visible on my telly.

So, robbed of a bonus point, but 4 points in the bag in their first fixture in Africa. The Stormers should be a tougher prospect, but a winnable game - and if the improvements continue week to week the Bulls might be a competitive game. But coming up against a team that's had a nice break with the Bye week, I think im being overly optimistic there! Anyway, this is one pretty chuffed 'almost' fan!

* I'm willing to admit that i'm either blind or stupid and there may have been a replay that I just couldn't find when searching the Sky website. But to be fair, when I entered 'Highlanders' into their search box, only one result showed, and that was for a replay of a game in the future anyway. So, instead of a handy search feature I had to scroll manually through their fugly TV Guide thing, which is slow so I gave up after getting to Tuesday.

In today's article, The Dropkicks' friend casual acquaintance guy we met once hated enemy Chris Rattue waxes on about rumours Sonny Bill Williams may head to Counties Manukau to play in the Air New Zealand Cup.

Chris has taken the ball here, turned around and ran away from the opposition team - the Logic First XV of Common Sense to score in his own tryline. He wouldn't be out of place spouting off his article amongst these people.

You've got a team which struggles to get a crowd, struggles to make money, and struggles to create good players - and the players it does get, like Lelia Masaga and Tim Nanai-Williams - it struggles to keep. What does it have working in its favour? Possibly how close it is to Mt Smart Stadium, home of the Warriors.

You get Sonny Bill to Counties, you have the first game on a Friday night when the Warriors aren't playing, you'll sell out Growers Stadium, or Mt Smart. Maybe even Eden Park.

On top of that, how on earth is it a bad idea to get a standout league player, who has been playing at a high level in France [and let's not mention the Sonny Bill v Wallabies testimonial last year where he didn't make any mistakes that I remember] to your bottom-dwelling team?

People continually spout the line 'one player does not make a team'. To which I say: look at the differences between a Carter or McCaw-less All Blacks or Crusaders, or Manawatu without Aaron Cruden, or Counties with Lomu and Vidiri. While one player can't turn around a team, they can bring up the skill level of those around them - not to mention the confidence.

SBW will always be judged by how he left Australia, but until that point he'd honoured all his contracts, hadn't he? And his Toulon one? So why would Counties be worried he'd nick off? Nah, I reckon The Rat is just jealous, 'cause he knows if he pulled a dick-stunt like SBW did the country would be glad he'd gone, not staking out airports in Paris for sightings of him.

The distance between our two countries may physically only be 2,200km but Shaun Tait, Brendon McCullum and Martin Guptill showed that there's a bigger gap when it comes to celebrating good work.

This could have been up well before the weekend, but I made an editorial decision to wait for the announcement of the new Hurricanes coach and ended up cutting that section from the podcast.

The first 10m or so are really loud, before it goes quiet for some reason, sorry. The dictaphone didn't even move!

The Golden State Warriors have slowly but surely replaced the Celtics as my 'cheat' team, due to a sports tumblr I follow maintained by a guy who's a GSW fan, and as a result, posts a lot of news about them.

The team is San Francisco's NBA basketball franchise, and as a way of respecting SF [and possibly a way of expanding their fan base - the team is kinda crap] they've decided to honour the LGBT community at a game.

Other events that day include a special tailgating event, lounge access before the game, an special LGBT event t-shirt to mark the night, and seating with other gay and lesbian basketball fans.

Additionally, the National Anthem will be performed by the Oakland Gay Men’s Chorus, and there will be a halftime performance by Cheer SF, a local gay cheerleading squad.

This is the first LGBT community night with the Golden State Warriors, but isn’t the NBA’s first. The Philadelphia 76ers hosted the first Gay and Lesbian community night in 2004. While the Toronto Raptors held an LGBT night dubbed Rainbow Hoops, a lesbian recreational basketball league in Toronto on February 23, 2007.

Source

Particularly pertinent considering the NBA has to deal with douchebags like this.