Steve Deane: The Kumuls deserve a bit of respect, tennis bloke

Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Blaming yourself is a bit like jogging. We never really want to do it, it's never any fun and the benefits are questionable. But for some reason (probably that we think it might make us better humans) many of us feel compelled to do it anyway.

Sometimes it can actually be therapeutic. I blame myself, for instance, for getting annoyed by a punditry segment on a sports radio station every Sunday morning. I don't need to.

My car has only one channel on its radio; I have to travel into the office at the time the segment is on, and my wife insists on taking my CDs out of the car and hiding them. I could happily lay the blame at the feet of Japanese car manufacturers, the ridiculous cost of radio-band expanders, the wife or just pure bad luck.

But I don't. I know deep down it is me who turns the radio on and me who is too slow to turn it off before I hear something that is going to make me fly into a rage.

IT IS MY FAULT. So usually I just suck it up and move on. Not this time.

A bloke who appears to watch a lot of sport on telly hosts the segment that annoys me so. His guests include a former bowls commentator and a former tennis player. It's an odd line-up, but not one that is overly inclined to annoy. Unless of course they start waffling on about things they know nothing about. Which seems to be pretty much everything other than bowls, tennis and whatever happens to have become trapped in the host's MySky box.

The sport this lot specialise in knowing the least about is league, and yet week-in week-out they feel compelled to regale their audience (mainly people with Japanese import cars, I suspect) with their staggering lack of footy knowledge.

A fortnight ago they came up with their best effort yet. "Jeez, I dunno what Papua New Guinea are doing in this tournament," the tennis player asked as the panel allegedly previewed the Four Nations. "What a joke."

Unsurprisingly, neither the host nor the bowls man could find any fault with this statement. Neither thought to say something like: "Well, tennis bloke, Papua New Guinea is a nation of close to seven million people, many of whom are quite fond of league. In fact, it is probably the only country in the world that can truly boast league as its number one sport. It's also a poverty-stricken, under-developed, violent, strife-torn country badly in need of the sort of unifying force - or even simple good cheer - that sport can provide.

"So having them in the tournament is actually kind of cool.

"But, tennis bloke, none of that has anything to do with why they are in the tournament. They are in the sodding tournament because they qualified as a matter of right by winning last year's Pacific Cup. Easily.

"They weren't the most fancied side in the Pacific. That was Samoa. NRL and Super League player-studded Samoa. The same Samoa the Kiwis thrashed by 50 in the warm-up you've just been reviewing. The same Samoa who didn't even qualify for the Pacific Cup because they lost a qualifier to the Cook Islands.

"You see, tennis bloke, league actually does exist outside of New Zealand, Australia and England. The reason the Tri-Nations is now the Four Nations is so second-tier nations have something to aspire to, something tangible to play for, a pathway into the top tier.

"That's why the Kumuls are in the Four Nations. It's not a joke. They deserve to be here, and they deserve a bit of respect.

"As an aside, tennis bloke, Wales won this year's European Cup by beating France in the final. So Wales will replace France in next year's Four Nations when it returns to Europe. And no, they are not a joke either. Wales even has its own professional club now, which seems to have helped their national side no end. So maybe, just maybe, the efforts to grow the game internationally are actually working. And maybe it is something worth persevering with.

"Now, tell me, before I go jogging to vent my fury, what's wrong with Marina Erakovic?"