OPINION
How the abrasive coaching master and his Kiwi apprentice are cooking up something special for Scott Robertson; the iconic Kiwi motorsport brand McLaren is back in the F1 limelight; and the America’s Cup unveils its “Ghost Boat”.
Sports Insider: Why the mad chemistry of Rassie Erasmus and Tony Brown should scare All Blacks fans
Lando Norris, Lydia Ko and Rassie Erasmus. Photos / Photosport
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But mostly, for Kiwis anyway, it’s the successive World Cups he’s collected at the All Blacks’ expense.
At some stage, loathing from a distance can give way to grudging admiration.
The man has stared down the challenge of the British and Irish Lions and won two World Cups. Only Andy Farrell’s Ireland can claim to be an equal in the debate for the best team of the past five years.
Erasmus will do anything to win. And keep on winning.
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Rather than falling into a predicted post-World Cup trough due to ageing legs, scarily there are signs that the Boks are getting even better under Erasmus.
The shrewd mentor is developing frightening depth of talent as well as unearthing special talents, while squeezing unexpectedly strong performances from veterans like Siya Kolisi and Malcolm Marx.
Erasmus is doing this while eyeing two immediate goals – outright consistent ownership of the world’s No 1 ranking and dominance of the Rugby Championship.
Standing in the way of their second goal, if not the first, is Scott Robertson and the All Blacks. Indeed, South Africa’s record in the southern hemisphere’s top competition stands at a lowly four wins in 24 starts, compared to New Zealand’s 20 in 28 years.
Erasmus wants to start squaring up that ledger, starting with a 2-0 wipeout of the All Blacks over the next two weekends, which would secure the 2024 championship.
If there wasn’t already much to fear about Ellis Park this Sunday morning and Cape Town the next, there is also a shivering anticipation about one of our own being hired by Erasmus to add a dimension to the Boks game we all thought they had given up on: attack.
If Sir Wayne Smith is the Professor of world rugby, Tony Brown is his successor, and one who is growing into similar mastery. He has a coaching feel for the attacking game that is constantly evolving.
Like Smith, he also prefers to operate in the corridors and back rooms.
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Unlike (it seems) Leon McDonald, he is content to be an assistant coach, performing that role ably under and alongside former Highlanders teammate Jamie Joseph with Japan’s national team.
There were signs during the Boks’ recent two-test obliteration of Joe Schmidt’s Wallabies on Australian turf that the mad chemistry of Erasmus’s all-consuming search for an edge and Brown’s rare thinking was being harnessed.
South Africa are developing a fleet-of-mind game plan to match their menacing physical presence and indomitable fighting spirit. Brown’s fingerprints are all over the surprising innovation the Boks are now showing.
Over the next two weekends, the All Blacks – with a less-settled coaching staff – will encounter the full fury of that machine being constantly tweaked by Erasmus and Brown.
It’s an intimidating challenge.
Listen live: All Blacks v South Africa, live on Newstalk ZB, GOLD SPORT & iHeartRadio, 3am Sunday
Whisper it quietly: Team McLaren back as F1 giants
It’s already been a special sporting year for New Zealand.
But there may be some cream on the cake coming in the form of an iconic Kiwi motorsport name with historical links to Formula 1 being back in worldwide headlines and on the brink of a breakthrough achievement.
Sports Insider is rapidly getting a sniff of Formula One fever.
It’s not just the speculation growing about the 2025 grid prospects of rising Kiwi star Liam Lawson, it’s the fact we now have the most competitive F1 scene in years due to the crumbling dominance of the Red Bull team.
And spearheading that renaissance of rival competition is a familiar Kiwi name: McLaren.
After Lando Norris won his second race of the season last weekend, ending Max Verstappen’s dominant run in his home event, the Dutch Grand Prix, and with Australian teammate Oscar Piastri finishing fourth, McLaren have inched towards being in striking distance of the coveted Constructors Championship.
The constructors title has been in Red Bull’s keeping for six seasons since 2010, including the past two.
But, after breakthrough performances over the past few months, the papaya orange colours of the McLaren open-wheelers made famous in the 1970s by Kiwi motorsport icon Bruce McLaren are now suddenly in the limelight again.
McLaren sit second in the team championship standings, considered by purists to be the real F1 championship (rather than the individual driver title), and just 30 points behind Red Bull. Norris is second to Red Bull’s Verstappen in the driver standings with nine races to go.
F1 Constructors Championship
- Red Bull: 434 points
- McLaren: 404
- Ferrari: 370
- Mercedes: 276
- Aston Martin: 74
These are the headiest times for McLaren since the days of Mika Häkkinen and their last Constructors Championship in 1998.
The competitive improvement from McLaren has been driven by Californian businessman Zak Brown, who has taken a special interest in the team’s New Zealand links and was instrumental in changing the racing livery back to papaya.
Brown, who features strongly on Netflix’s Drive To Survive series, is also patron of the Auckland-based Bruce McLaren Trust run by Bruce’s daughter Amanda McLaren. The trust plans to resurrect the famed Remuera Rd garage Bruce started out in, including a museum.
The American’s interest in McLarens began early in his career as a prolific car collector and several of the brand’s most famous supercars from the 1970s can be found in his mega-car collection stored in an English warehouse.
‘Ghost Boat’ to add intrigue to America’s Cup TV coverage
While on things that fly very fast, the America’s Cup pre-regatta held off Barcelona revealed a surprisingly wide competitive field of contenders looking to take on Team New Zealand next month.
That’s helpful given the build-up to the Cup (up until this point, anyway) has failed to capture Kiwi interest in the same fashion as previous campaigns.
There are several reasons why that is so, including the nation being distracted by the Paris Olympics and the birth of the Razor Robertson All Blacks coaching era.
But overwhelmingly, the main reason is that the defence of the Cup is happening offshore.
That’s a shame because the initial racing has been intense and already several notches ahead of what we saw in Auckland during the Covid-impacted defence campaign of 2021.
Peter Burling, Blair Tuke and their well-oiled crew face a significant mission in retaining the Auld Mug.
I’m not sure if that will be enough to drag Kiwis out of their beds in the middle of the night to watch duelling foils off the Spanish coast, but we shall see.
In the meantime, the America’s Cup itself is attempting to modernise its broadcast coverage with new real-time TV graphics designed to educate the audience on sailing and therefore increase fans’ engagement.
Most of the ideas, to put it kindly, look to have been borrowed from Sir Russell Coutts’ successful SailGP series, also based on foiling boats (catamarans) and with a Kiwi team helmed by Burling and Tuke.
The AmCup boffins claim to have developed a system that can accurately capture and visualise real-time wind speed and direction data and integrate it into the live race broadcast.
On-screen graphics, using augmented-vision and virtual-reality tech, are overlaid on live video feeds, which allows the creation of a live “ghost boat”, displaying the optimal route for a boat to take, given current conditions.
America’s Cup PR folk say the aim of the system is to provide commentators and viewers with insight into how conditions are affecting race strategy. The unspoken element is that will also highlight strategic blunders by skippers and key crew members.
The new graphics will be included in coverage on the America’s Cup website and an official YouTube channel, where you can watch every race live for free.
Meet the new Usain Bolt... only this one could be the real deal
Courtesy of the online world we now live in, sport is littered with digital teases of the next great thing.
And so, earlier this year, we were introduced to an Australian teenager said to be “the next Usain Bolt” after a series of brilliant sprinting performances.
Queenslander Gout Gout, born in Australia to South Sudanese parents, could be exactly that.
Uncannily, the 16-year-old not only looks like Olympic legend Bolt but runs like him too. Take a look here.
The 16-year-old has a running style that looks like Bolt’s, too.
Gout’s times for the 100m and 200m sprint are rivalling what Bolt achieved at the same age, exciting the international world about his potential. He is about to make his Australian team debut at the World Athletics Under-20 Championships in Peru.
Watch this space.
Untold is back with a big reputation to live up to
The latest season of Netflix’s Untold sports documentary series has dropped.
Based on a premise of bringing new information to light and changing viewers’ perceptions of major sporting scandals or controversial stars, Untold has been a stellar performer in the sports-doco genre.
Since debuting in 2021 with a riveting episode titled Malice at the Palace on a brutal fight between players and fans at an NBA game in 2004, Untold has delivered on its premise.
A standout episode was season two’s opener The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist, about Samoan-heritage American college football star Manti Te’o’s online relationship with a girl that didn’t exist.
I followed the bizarre news at the time it broke, and put it down as another of those “only-in-America” stories. Watching what really happened was riveting television.
Each season has varied in the number of instalments and storylines and Untold’s 2024 offering is across three storylines with a weekly drop.
The opening episodes, based on a 2009 murder-suicide resulting in the death of a retired NFL quarterback, were a disappointing letdown compared to recent years.
But I’ll give the new volume the benefit of the doubt for now and watch the second storyline to drop, Sign Stealers, based on the sign-stealing controversy that hit American baseball last year.
The third and final storyline, due out next week, is Solo and is centred on controversial US football (they call it soccer) pioneer Hope Solo.
Team of the Week
Lydia Ko
The Kiwi golf phenomenon said she couldn’t find a word in the dictionary to describe her past three weeks of Olympic gold glory, Hall of Fame admission and now a British Open. Nor can we.
Noni Madueke
The Chelsea winger scores a hat-trick against Wolves on their home ground after being taunted incessantly by rival fans for calling Wolverhampton a “shit city”. He apologised after the 6-2 win.
The Paralympics
It sounds cheesy but the four-yearly gathering really does showcase the power of the human spirit and what can be achieved by testing the body to its absolute limits.
