Lewis Hamilton after winning the Bahrain GP. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
From out of nowhere, from beyond pit lane, we have an avid F1 fan in the house. There's no history of it at chez Cleaver, no dinner table conversations about Bruce McLaren, the Tifosi or downforce aerodynamics.
Well, not quite out of nowhere. Out of Netflix, actually, and more specifically Drive to Survive, the "embedded" documentary series that has followed the drivers and team principals through the twists and chicanes of the past three seasons.
It is great viewing, spectacularly shot, pleasingly impolitic and occasionally funny. It's a dazzling advertisement for a sport which, to these eyes anyway, often fails to deliver on the track due to the lopsided nature of the field and the extreme difficulty in manufacturing wheel-to-wheel racing.
Drive to Survive has made the sport and its combatants relatable in a way few would have thought possible given the mind-boggling costs and technology that come with it.
It also brings home just what an opportunity New Zealand Rugby spurned when they had Amazon Prime's All or Nothing cameras following the All Blacks for the 2017 season.
While the individual players occasionally gave of themselves more than they were probably comfortable, the inner workings of the All Black machinery remained sanitised and unknowable. It was essentially rugby soft-porn, titillating existing fans with a peek behind the curtains but it was unlikely to convert new fans.
The whole idea of "the jersey" holding this mystical power makes for good slogans, but ordinary television.
It feels like there is scope for a redux, like Drive to Survive, one that encompasses several seasons. One that allows characters and personality to develop; where conflict and resolution and all the classic narrative tropes flourish. Make it all, not nothing.
The sort of show that could skew rugby's rapidly ageing fanbase younger.
Bat men
You don't want to read about Devon Conway again. I don't really want to write about Conway again. So let's keep the top of this brief and just run some numbers.
The 29 year old has batted in three one-day internationals and scored 27, 72 and 126.
In T20 internationals he's racked up scores of 41, 65*, 5, 63, 99*, 2, 38, 17, 36, 92*.
He's walked to the crease 13 times for his adopted country and passed 50 nearly half the time while playing the majority of those innings in a format that makes scoring big very difficult.
He will be faced with bigger challenges in foreign conditions but it is difficult to think of a rookie batsman who has made a bigger impact for the Black Caps.
His brilliance has tended to overshadow the greater good that is bubbling beneath the surface: New Zealand has built enviable batting depth from such a small talent pool.
Yesterday was perhaps the first time many New Zealanders got to see how good Will Young is. If anything, the quality of his stroke play overshadowed Conway during their century stand. Conway has yet to play a test, Young has played two.
Then there is Glenn Phillips, who has played one test and no ODIs, who has had an outstanding summer. Daryl Mitchell has played just four tests and 20 internationals in total, already has two centuries for his country in limited opportunities.
A scan of the domestic scores shows incumbent test opener Tom Blundell scored an unbeaten century down the order for Wellington while the man earmarked to be the country's next long-term test opener, Rachin Ravindra, also brought up a ton.
It's worth repeating that much bigger tests will come but in terms of depth of batting talent, these are unprecedented times for New Zealand cricket.
Crusaders/Scott Robertson
They didn't even play this weekend yet emerged as the biggest winners after the Blues blew it against the Chiefs. Just hand them the title already.
Meanwhile, up in the north, a couple of high-profile coaches are under big pressure to save their jobs.
Guess whose name is going to be bandied about willy-nilly in the UK media machine?
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck
A big week for the rugby-bound fullback. RTS was quite brilliant in the Warriors' ludicrous come-from-way-behind victory against the Canberra Raiders but it was something else he did that caught the eye.
According to reports, it was RTS that convinced Broncos junior Reece Walsh to commit to the Warriors.
The amazing thing about this is that the story revealed he'd never seen Walsh but had only heard "that he's quite sharp".
Tuivasa-Sheck had a coffee with Walsh near the club's Terrigal base and decided he was down to earth. That was apparently enough.
Am I the only one left with way more questions than answers about this recruitment drive?
New Zealand Rugby
The awkward fact they're yet to convince the stakeholders who potentially have the most to gain out of the proposed $465 million Silver Lake deal – their best players – says a lot.
With the reported injection the country's cash-starved 26 provincial unions are set to receive, NZR are seemingly targeting the weakest point in the operation.
Very few of those unions can stand on their own feet. This is rugby's principal problem and one they have been singularly unable to address.
Without making fundamental and far-reaching changes to the very structure of the sport, giving unions cash handouts is as effective a long-term strategy as building a bonfire out of money, dousing it in kerosene and lighting a match.
Eden Park 'research'
Every now and then an email drops into the inbox so unintentionally hilarious you're not sure if its satire, spam or both.
This happened in the middle of the night this weekend from a PR outfit called Blueclaw, based in Leeds, working presumably on behalf of a cricket betting website in India.
Behold.
"Eden Park – home of Auckland cricket since 1910 – is the people's choice as the most popular cricketing venue, new research suggests.
"Data compiled by cricket tipping experts, Cricket Bet India, combined three key metrics – Instagram tags, Facebook check-ins and average global monthly web search volume - to rank the leading cricketing stadiums around the world in order of perceived popularity as a score out of 100.
"… Cricket Bet India's Fans' Favourite has removed all subjectivity and ranked grounds based on cold, hard facts.
"In this case, it was New Zealand's largest sporting venue – Eden Park… that clinched top-billing with 66.96 out of 100."
Objectively speaking, this is the sort of nonsense that usually appears once a year on a date that corresponds with this Thursday.
Bangladesh
New Zealand have been good, but some of Bangladesh's cricket has been amateur-hour quality.
You probably don't know much about English League Two football side Forest Green Rovers, nestled fifth on the table between the once-mighty Bolton Wanderers and never-mighty Morecambe. It might be time to start taking notice.
An international cricket season like no other ends this week. Double-headers between the White Ferns and Australia and Blacks Caps v Bangladesh, from 2.30pm, Tuesday and Thursday, Spark Sport. The latter are looking to win seven series in a summer for the only time and the former are trying to prove they can match it with their transtasman neighbours.
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