Posts by Russell Brown
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Perceived TV audience ratings (and media bidding wars, and so perceived value by media bosses, who happen mostly to be male)?
See above. Moving to pay TV has decimated netball's TV audience.
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Hard News: The good guys, in reply to Lilith __,
I’m glad the women in the men’s rugby crew are being recognised. But it’s still men’s rugby. And women may enjoy watching it, but they don’t get much recognition when they play it.
I watch the Black Ferns, but not many other people do. And it's good, but it it's not as exciting to watch. The strength, skill, speed and intensity are nothing like those in men's international rugby. To be honest, they'd probably be beaten by a NZ Schools team.
It's a bit different in tennis, where the women's game can often be a better watch than seeing two Slavic giants blast the ball at each other. I don't think it's a coincidence that prize money in major tennis tournaments has been equal for men and women for a long time. Or that the world's three highest-earning female athletes are tennis players (with a figure skater next).
There was quite a big netball match last Friday night between NZ and Australia, the current world champions. It was a heart-stopping game that went right down to the wire, with the Ferns winning the game but losing the cup by a nose. Almost zero media coverage for that, the media utterly preoccupied with All Blacks. Would the Silver Ferns have got parades if they’d won the Constellation Cup? Fawning politicians? I doubt it.
Netball has suffered very badly from the move to pay TV. The additional money is good for the sport but not for public engagement. Audiences have been way down compared to the free-to-air era – as much as 75%. That's part of it. I don't watch as much netball as I used to.
Otoh, the Constellation Cup (us playing the only other good team in the world, again) very probably got more viewers than the Kiwi rugby league team's game against England this week, which was barely reported. The RWC drowned out everything.
Women’s sport has at best a niche audience, yet we’re all expected to feel strongly about men’s sport.
It depends on the sport, especially outside team sports. I'd struggle to name a New Zealand cyclist, but I could definitely name Sarah Ulmer. Cycling is another sport where prize money is equal. But pro team sports? All about the men, everywhere.
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I kinda hate these stats for Rugby. People quote those percentages as if all those games are the same standard. The reality is there are only a handful of countries playing Rugby seriously and our stats against those countries are nowhere near as dominant. Essentially the numbers get puffed up by playing the other nations.
Not even remotely true. Nearly all the All Blacks’ matches are against Tier 1 nations and most of them are in the Rugby Championship, which is made up of all four RWC 2015 semi-finalists. The others in the four years up to the RWC were against Six Nations sides, plus the one game against Samoa.
That’s true in most competitions but I’d suggest that the NBA is a much more even competition and so dominance is much harder, same for baseball and same for football (the roundball version).
Kinda. Half the teams in the NBA have never won a championship in its 70-year history (and most aren’t likely to) and nearly half of all the championships have been won by two teams, the Celtics and the Lakers. Only nine different teams have won a championship in the last 35 years.
And the likes of the English Premier League are hugely uneven. How many teams have a shot each year? The guy who figured that only three teams were rich enough to win this past season turned out to be right.
Yes, a weekly professional competition is different to international rugby, but Tonga beat France in the last RWC and Japan beat South Africa this time. The hugely wealthy England side only rarely beat the All Blacks and Ireland have never won against us in the history of the game. The fact that nearly one in three coaches at this year’s tournament were New Zealanders suggests we’re doing something right.
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Hard News: The good guys, in reply to Bart Janssen,
NZ crowds would boo
Interesting isn’t it that the team behaves so much better than our crowds.
That's not quite it. Drop goals (and more particularly attempted drop goals) were booed because they were seen as negative play. Now that they win us world cup final matches, drop goals are of course AWESOME.
Making a bit of noise is part of the fun of being in a big match crowd. I myself have been known to advise the referee when he's in error. I like to help.
But rugby crowds aren't really like people who don't go to games think they are. If anything, they're a bit quiet. Opposing fans sit happily amongst each other and there are women and families. You'll get the odd boofhead, but I honestly can't remember the last time I witnessed it.
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Hard News: The good guys, in reply to Peter Darlington,
As one who takes a desultory interest in rugby at best – just tell me the final score – I have watched with interest how manly all this is.
The thing that really brought a lump to my throat at the end was seeing the women who were part of the All Blacks management group going up to get their medals. I can’t say I know enough about their setup to know who they were but they were obviously equals within the group and were as excited as everyone else to be up there to receive them.
Yes! I'd like to know more about them. I recall it being a pretty big deal when Jane Dent was the All Blacks' comms manager – basically the voice of the team – in the 90s. And of course there's Melody Robinson.
The person whose opinion I respect about rugby pretty much in the world is Tracey Nelson (although I'm very disappointed to see she's been too busy celebrating to get her RWC final game stats together), but I know a few other women who follow the game keenly.
Most of the feminists in my Twitter timeline have been perving at the players and retweeting that picture of SBW and Ma'a on a bed in their undies, but that's cool too.
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to George Darroch,
An off-topic question, but one that’s perhaps worth asking: When will New Zealand produce it’s first Asian All Black?
The team is a tapestry of shades of white and brown, but we’re more than that now (and always were, to greater and lesser extents). I expect it has more to do with the pipeline than with demographics.
There might be a little in there now, given that 30,000 Samoans claim some Chinese heritage.
But the NRL in Australia has a few players of Asian heritage, mostly Filipino.
And NZ rugby league coaches and former players Willie Poching (Samoan-Chinese) and Alex Chan (Maori-Chinese) both played for the Kiwis.
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Just deleted a spammy comment above. Sorry it took a little while, been busy.
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This reminds me of the time that our street had a physical outage in phone service – a Watercare worker broke a drain which flooded the ancient paper-insulated copper at the corner.
It took a week to repair and our very unwell elderly neighbour, George, became quite distressed as he had a medical alarm that relied on the phone line. I acted after talking to him and Telecom actually got it and were as helpful as they could be. From memory, we gave him one of the boys’ mobile phones and I think they even zero-rated the calls. It didn’t replace the alarm but it was better than nothing.
What struck me was the way no other bugger helped him – not the DHB nor his landlord, Housing NZ. How often must this stuff happen?
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And now it transpires that Beauden Barrett committed a wonderful act of generosity too.
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Hard News: The good guys, in reply to Bart Janssen,
That is impressive when you remember just how young some of them are, both in age and in life experience, going from school to professional rugby does not give you much chance to learn much about the world or yourself.
And they're subject to all the temptations and pressures of celebrity.
Eight or 10 years ago, there were a few young All Blacks with poor reputations for public behaviour. Almost without us noticing, that seems to have completely changed.
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