El Niche Cache
September 2, 2020
The Niche Cast Podcast
iTunes | Spotify | The Niche Cache | Youtube
Reading Menu
Kiwi-UFC 253: Israel Adesanya vs Paulo Costa Debrief (UFC)
Kiwi-UFC 253: Better Learn About Brad Riddell Asap (UFC)
Domestic Cricket Daily: Movers and Groovers (Cricket)
Kiwi-NRL Encyclopedia: NRLW + NRL Finals Round Tahi (NRL)
DOAAWF: Saluting The Aotearoa Warriors Class of 2020 (NRL)
Flying Kiwis – September 29 (Football)
The Wildcard’s NFL Picks - Week 4 (NFL)
27fm Weekly Niche Cache Playlist: September 28 (Music)
27fm Album Jukebox – September 2020 (Music)
Scotty’s Word
Penrith Panthers junior system.
The Panthers have been all class this season, claiming the minor premiership and putting themselves in a nice spot for the Finals - we’ve seen how NBA basketball changes from regular season to playoffs and a bit more in the NBA Finals so I’m pondering how this funky style of NRL footy changes from the regular season to Finals.
Of the 17 players listed for tonight’s game vs Roosters, 10 players are Panthers juniors and that becomes 11 if we include James Fisher-Harris whom the Panthers recruited from Northland. Bump it up to 12 players if we include the 18th and 19th men for the Panthers (Mitch Kenny and Spencer Leniu).
I’ve offered that nugget of the two predatory hunters of NZ Warriors talent now working together to keep the best talent in Aotearoa for NZ Warrior. Former Storm and Roosters recruitment guru Peter O’Sullivan is doing a low key job behind the scene for the Warriors and Phil Gould’s about to get super busy alongside O’Sullivan.
Forget all the media stuff around Gould or any diminishing of Gould’s influence in revamping the Panthers junior system; Gould’s work as part of a Panthers crew has resulted in 10-11 Panther juniors named in a team of 17 for the first round of Finals footy. That’s the nek level for the Warriors - simple.
While some came up through the Panthers local system (Penrith, Mount Druitt etc), many Panthers juniors have been brought in from country towns. I’ve got a snap of a yarn I read about this below and another note from this yarn is that the Panthers don’t need to recruit from Queensland or Aotearoa because they have everything they need in their own backyard. Gould’s note solely responsible and many good folk appear to have been working in the same direction, yet it’s reckless to overlook Gould’s role in all of this as it was kinda is mission objective along with the financial pickle that the Panthers were in when he arrived - got the finances sorted and they are re-invested in local talent.
Country academies, local academies, investment in junior pathways and look at the result.
I’ve counted five Kiwi-NRLW wahine in the Warriors, three for the Broncos and one for the Roosters. Major dip in numbers but there was a nice boost in seeing Amber Hall re-up with the Broncos. Here’s the Kiwi-NRLW wahine list…
Warriors: Georgia Hale, Madison Bartlett, Kanyon Paul, Hilda Peters, Crystal Tamarua.
Roosters: Nita Maynard.
Broncos: Raecene McGregor, Lavinia Gould, Amber Hall.
Blues Under 18s vs Chiefs Under 18s
The Blues and Chiefs rolled out a couple Under 18 teams that played each other yesterday and I noted four Blues Under 18 players who are in the NZ Warriors system; Tony Tafa (Kelston Boys), Francis Manuleleua, Ali Leiataua (Kings College), Jeremiah Asi (St Peters).
Tafa and Asi have also been named in the NZ Barbarian Under 18 team, expect the NZ Secondary Schools Team to be named soon enough.
Trent Boult trucks along.
Boult is ranked 5th in wickets for the IPL with 6w @ 21.50avg/8.41rpo. That can be twisted into tied-3rd for wickets, but Boult’s a bit more expensive than the others. Jimmy Neesham doesn’t fit on the top-50 list for runs or wickets, at least he is playing fairly consistently with three games; bowled in all three games with 1w and batted once for 7 runs.
Kane Williamson scored 41 in his first and only appearance thus far @ 157.69sr. Never ever let anyone talk shit about Williamson or Ross Taylor as T20 batsmen because I reckon they are the two best T20 batsmen in Aotearoa and both have a lot to offer ahead of whenever the next T20 World Cup is…
Kane Williamson
T20I: 32.64avg/125.18sr.
T20: 30.28vg/125sr.
Ross Taylor
T20I: 26.51avg/122.68sr.
T20: 31.20avg/130.89sr.
For T20 cricket, I’d put the excellence markers at 30+ average and 130+ strike-rate.
Below are most recent/notable Luke Thomas breakdowns of Israel Adesanya. Watch these and you will quickly get a gauge of what Adesanya does well and how he’s developed in the UFC.
Wildcard’s Notebook
That kiwi summer of cricket schedule’s got me thinking, aye? First thought is: hell yeah, cricket’s back! And given all the dramas around world sport at the moment and the sloppiness that even our biggest sport is having right now in trying to organise international sport – not gonna go into it but NZ Rugby are embarrassing themselves on the daily at this point – that’s not something to sleep on. The logistics of this will have been ruthless so to get to the stage where we can have four touring international sides over the course of more or less a full summer schedule is rather impressive and deserves a heap of praise. Don’t take that for granted, not at all.
With that in mind, a couple things that struck with me... one is that the Super Smash doesn’t appear to have a sponsor any longer. All the official documents and press just call it ‘Super Smash’, no more Dream11. Which means that your favourite Indian fantasy cricket providers are no longer involved... feel free to shed a tear over that. It also means one more year, one more change in sponsorship (at the moment there isn’t one, we’ll see what happens there between now and December). Here’s the list of past names, I was gonna look this up but Wikipedia’s already taken care of it for me...
New Zealand Twenty20 Competition – One season
State Twenty20 – Three seasons
HRV Cup/Twenty20 – Five seasons
Georgie Pie Super Smash – Two seasons
McDonald's Super Smash – One season
Burger King Super Smash – Two seasons
Dream11 Super Smash – One season
The other thing is where the hell is all the ODI cricket? Remember when the Blackcaps made the grand final of the last World Cup, didn’t just make it even but almost bloody won it? We didn’t lose it, at least. Well that final happened on 14 July 2019. After that the Blackcaps had Test/T20 series in Sri Lanka and at home to England followed by three Tests in Australia (try not to recall that one) and then India came for five T20s and it wasn’t until then that we finally played another ODI. 5 February 2020... that was 207 days in between ODIs after the World Cup. There were three games against India there, which we won the lot of, then we lost an eerie ODI in Australia before that series was cancelled as the lockdown came around.
That lockdown also put the prospect of playing limited overs’ stuff in Europe to an end (we were going to Ireland, with additional ODIs against Scotland and Netherlands), same as a 3 ODI tour (plus 3 T20s) in the West Indies in July and of course the Test Championship tour to Bangladesh in Ireland (no limited overs games). So that’s ten combined ODIs that we missed out on including the Aussie stuff as well. And it’s not until after the Bangladesh series that we have another ODI. We’re talking 13 March 2021 there. We were meant to play the abandoned ODI series properly in Aussie in January but with the timelines of quarantines that’s been kicked into touch instead. We’re potentially the best ODI team on the planet (well, first equal) and by the time the first ODI against Bangladesh begins it will have been 609 days since the World Cup final and we’d have played four One Day Internationals in that time.
There’s more to the summer of cricket than the obvious stuff though. It’s also the dawn of the Spark Sport Era which is something I’ve had a bundle of thoughts about but ultimately am struggling to put any context to them until the season actually begins (oh and that’s the other thing... the Plunket Shield is expected to start sometime around 20 October and we still don’t have a bloody draw or whatever, sort it out – the crying over the lack of marketabilty in the Plunket Shield from NZC, like when they cut the rounds by two, holds zero water when they don’t even try). The streaming stuff will simply have to be a tumble down from the high dive board, not really anything I can say to prepare anyone.
But I’m excited for it. Some natural trickiness exists with internet connections being less reliable than satellite television but grab ya’self a chromecast or apple tv or whichever globally oppressive tech company you prefer and you’re pretty well sorted for most of it. I fully expect some dramas, largely due to people who are of an age that doesn’t easily endow them to change... but as long as Spark holds down their end of the bargain it should be sweet.
I say this as somebody who streams/watches a lot of sport. Some of it through legal means, some of it not (dunno if I’m alone here but the phone apps always stream way better than the websites on my laptop... yet buffstreams and the like are flawless on the laptop... and more annoying on the phone because of the pop-up ads and the pesky tiny X’s on the top corners of the hover ads). In terms of ease of streams there’s nothing compares to the varieties of options available to NFL fans. The NBA would be a close second on that matter while European football is always available if it involves the big clubs/countries. Combat sports are always there waiting to access although the irregular events mean that you sometimes need a couple streams ready to go because the authorities do go pretty hard at shutting them down (a lot easier for one night than it is for every Sunday for four months, etc.). But those alternatives are always out there. Cricket’s not too hard to get a handle on either. It’s one of those things where the fans exist so the service will always exist.
But the legal options are waaaaay better in every way except for the price. Streams are way more consistent, they buffer quicker, no pop up ads to manoeuvre through, not to mention that those subs you pay are putting money back into the sport to keep it sustainable. Given the option, there’s no contest... and it’s been pleasing to see so many streaming apps really up their game in the last year or two. Sky GO is the purest example of one which has gone from a complete disaster to actually a secretly excellent app. Many times a week I’ll find myself with a game on my phone on Sky GO as I do something else, even if it’s just so I can still keep an eye on the basketball while on the dunny. TVNZ’s On Demand service is another undercover beauty. Spark Sport, naturally. Gotta get my Premier League from somewhere. Bein Sports Connect is much more of a handful to use but the quantity of football available on it is something that even a lot of footy fans maybe don’t realise... and it’s free to use if you’ve got a Sky login. And obviously YouTube and Netflix lead the way internationally.
Netflix is the one to copy if you’re looking for the standard bearer for user interface and ease of access and all those silly technical terms. In fact that’s the overwhelming problem with those local options... the streams themselves aren’t the problem, it’s the getting to them. Sky GO actually has a video library, to go with all the live channels, which is second only to Netflix in terms of what they can offer a kiwi viewer but you wouldn’t hardly know it when you jump on the app... it’s mostly all hidden or in its own way. Spark could definitely use a whole lot more work in how they lay out the content available too... also them jerries gotta get those Premier League highlight packages up quicker on a Sunday morning, goddammit.
Enough of all that now... here’s an excerpt from my latest NFL predictions bit which I quite liked and which fits into the theme on offer. Streaming the American sports (which with the quality of the illegal streams is an exception to the rule because those buffstream badboys are way less intolerable than the endless cycle of the same infuriating ads and promos that you get served up watching the ESPN channel), you find yourself partaking in all manner of American advertisements as well. Ads which have a curious novelty to them on account of you don’t see them anywhere else and they’re mostly all products we have no access to so we don’t have to feel like they’re trying to manipulate us. There’s a distance there which leaves them utterly harmless... and often quite hilarious...
Power Rankings the Types of American Telly Ads:
5) Medical products full of smiling old people and soft lens focus which spend half the ad setting a calm and assured and healthy tone and then spend the other half listing excessive quantities of potential side effects
4) Insurance companies who use NFL quarterbacks (or NBA basketballers) in unusual circumstances to test their acting skills (which are often kinda decent, tbf), serving up excellent meme candidacy
3) Jewellery ads which are exceedingly soppy and always include either a mixed-race couple or multiple couples of different races, always with at least one white couple and one black couple, with lots of sparkly lights and often set around festive holidays and built up like the grand gesture at the end of a rom com... so over the top it’s amazing (still waiting for someone to make a jewellery ad that catches that Uncut Gems vibe)
2) Team merchandise ones where they flash through a wide variety of fans cheering in front of the telly and having a good old time... except for the variant where you can trade back your jersey for a new one and it’s all fans crying about devastating losses... probs a lot of NFL Shop hits from Atlanta recently
1) Local small businesses take the cake of course, they’re rare to stumble upon during an NFL broadcast (local NBA broadcasts in small markets are the best) but they do happen, where the low production value offers up so much unintentional humour that it’s hard to tell the difference between the real ones and the satirical ones on skit shows
Rightio. Party on dudes, and be excellent to each other.