Joe Bell Has Curly Hair
NZ Warriors transactions, NBA Draft Day Feels + Joe Bell's Transfer Status
Podcast
TNC Variety Show - Episode 26
Reading Menu
Flying Kiwis – July 27 (Football)
OlyWhites at Tokyo 2020: Quarter-Final Bound (Football)
It’s Happened Again: Steven Adams Has Been Traded To The Memphis Grizzlies (NBA)
The Levels of Depth Pushing Blackcaps Test Cricket Forward (Cricket)
2021 City Kickboxing UFC (/PFL) Tracker: The Mid-Year Basics (MMA)
Almost Daily Olympics Blog: Get Yourself An Earful (Olympics)
Scotty’s Word
Rugby League Tracking…
And just like that Roger Tuivasa-Sheck is no longer with NZ Warriors. The return to Aotearoa for Leeson Ah Mau is likely to see him cut ties with the Warriors as he is coming off contract and while I’d love for the Papatoetoe Panthers junior to stay with Warriors, that’s not the vibe I’ve been getting. 2021 was looking like a solid year for NZ Warriors after the mess of 2020 and yet somehow after that crazy 2020, everything escalated even further.
Thankfully for the Warriors - a lot of other sport is happening to flush their stuff away. This includes their performances on the field and instead of marking out time to watch the start of Warriors games to see what kind of mood they are in, Warriors games are now popping up on my radar as a bonus of sorts. Apart from cursed antics, there isn’t really any need to be dramatic about crappy Warriors performances and instead, I believe this is a clear example of how difficult competing is when players are coming and going mid-season; let alone the unstable foundation of NRL footy right now.
Any sports team who brings in three starters (Reece Walsh, Dallin Watene-Zelezniak and Matt Lodge) during the season is going to struggle. Combos, chemistry and intuitive play is crucial to sports. The Warriors have none of that and as such they are off the pace. Here are NZ Warriors transactions this year…
Losses
Peta Hiku: to Cowboys next season.
Karl Lawton: to Sea Eagles mid-season.
Ken Maumalo: to Tigers mid-season.
Hayze Perham: to Eels mid-season.
Paul Turner: to Titans next season.
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck: to Aotearoa mid-season.
Leeson Ah Mau: to Aotearoa mid-season.
Gains
Reece Walsh: from Broncos mid-season.
Matt Lodge: from Broncos mid-season.
Dallin Watene-Zelezniak: from Bulldogs mid-season.
Chad Townsend: from Sharks mid-season (then off to Cowboys).
Five mid-season departures is kinda bonkers and definitely not a recipe for success. It is a recipe to find grit and battle your way through such adversity so hopefully there are some benefits to emerge. Also notable here is the David Fusitu’a situation as he has not played since round five and apart from innuendo, there isn’t a whole lot concrete being floated around about the Fustiu’a situation.
All of that is part of the curse - how else does one explain this? It’s all unfortunate though and in this context along with the junior pipelines across two countries, it’s a minor miracle that they are still playing footy.
I’m excited about Tuivasa-Sheck’s move to rugby union. Any prediction ideas fall away to the fascination of how Tuivasa-Sheck fits into Aotearoa rugby - probably starting with some grassroots games that I’ll love to watch in person. As I explored in the Rugby Union Scout of Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, there are clear stages of development laid out (NPC - Super Rugby - All Blacks) as well as clear avenues for skill development with Tuivasa-Sheck owning the best running game in the world but lacking some play-making funk.
Consider that an intriguing sports yarn that will be fun to track. I’m not having quite as much fun tracking the RLWC shenanigans, although this is an important story that I am tracking - especially with the high quality and quantity in the Kiwi-NRL bucket.
Wildcard’s Notebook
Draft Day Vibes
The Olympics may be in full swing – and today, Friday, is absolutely stacked with kiwi athletes going either for medals or setting themselves up for medal contention from Emma Twigg and a host of other rowers to Venus/Daniell in the tennis to some more women’s sevens to David Nyika to a heap more sailors to the start of the women’s shot put and more – but it’s also NBA Draft Day.
The draft itself is always a bit of fun, it’s enjoyable to get an introduction to this new wave of basketballers as they enter the big time, it’s rewarding to watch them achieve a life-long dream, it’s curious to see the tactics that different teams take in terms of which players they target... all those things. But the funkiest part of all is the trades that happen adjacent to the draft.
Like, the draft itself is a crapshoot. All the research in the world can’t tell you for certain that a player will develop into the guy you think he can. There’s so much else that goes into player development and the biggest spanner in the works tends to be injuries. Better run organisations usually draft better not so much down to their scouting but because they can provide environments for young players to learn and grow. Even then, it’s still a bit random.
Hence the trades. It always gets confusing because you’ve got trades and picks happening simultaneously and those trades aren’t ratified by the league yet so teams are picking on behalf of other teams. The Steven Adams trade the other day is a prime example because the Grizzlies can’t complete it until they decline the option of Justice Winslow’s contract but they can’t do that until August 6 so Adams and Jonas Valanciunas (and the number 10 pick in the draft) will be in a limbo phase for the next week.
I’ve written about Steven Adams on the Grizzlies already, suffice to say that the more I’ve thought about it the more I love it. This is one of those franchises which should embrace the way that he plays given the legacies of Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph in Memphis. There’s a strong identity there under coach Taylor Jenkins with a young roster buying in entirely. They made the playoffs last season. Adams should be embraced as a leader in the locker room. He’s got a ready-made role replacing a similar player in Jonas Valanciunas (especially if his offseason shooting range practice is for real). Plus it’s also a chance to play with Ja Morant who is basically the next incarnation of Russell Westbrook, whom Adams played his best stuff with. Return of the pick and roll, baby. Get that into ya.
Speaking of Russell Westbrook...
It has begun.
Bellinho
Watching Joe Bell at the Olympics has been a lot like watching Joe Bell at the last U20 World Cup. He’s just a special player, a step above. The type of guy that New Zealand very rarely produces: He’s a pure midfielder who wins the ball in all variety of manners, constantly disrupting things, and distributes it smoothly. He’s strong in the challenge, reads the play well, great technique under pressure (which is maybe the most impressive thing), a clever passer, someone who can lift the tempo when needed too. Don’t forget his set piece delivery either. He’s had a superb Olympics so far.
At 22 years old he’s starting every week for a midtable team in Norway and they already love him there. You suspect he won’t be there for too many more seasons though – it was largely his performance against Norway at those U20s that got him this transfer to Viking FK (the same day that Aotearoa shut down Erling Haaland, who scored nine against Honduras in one of the other group stage matches) and you can only imagine what scouts will be watching this Olympic tournament.
There was a bloke on twitter the other day claiming that mid-level Premier League and top Championship clubs are interested in Joe Bell’s services... not gonna link that because it didn’t exactly feel like it was sourced information and you know what a wild west the old transfer circuit can be. People literally fabricate rumours out of thin air. But even if there’s absolutely nothing to it... the fact that Joe Bell is someone who people are making up transfer scoops about is a sign that he’s entering that stratosphere.
Which, for actual scouts he already would have been – same as with Libby Cacace: if you’re starting every week for a top twenty league in Europe aged under 24 then suffice it to say that all the scouts worth a damn already know who you are. Football Manager databases take care of that business with a ten second search. Norway, to be fair, is currently 22nd on UEFA’s coefficients but that feels harsh - gonna need Molde and Bodø/Glimt to go on big Conference League runs to boost that up. Belgium meanwhile is top ten so Libby Cacace is in even more of a golden light, plus he’s at a club that has more of a selling identity, picking up top international prospects (especially Japanese players since the club has Japanese ownership) and boosting them up to where every now and then someone gets sold for a huge profit. They paid €800k for Takehiro Tomiyasu a while back and two years later sold him to Bologna for €7m.
One annoying thing about searching for good Joe Bell rumours online: there’s a Mark Wahlberg movie coming out soon called Joe Bell. It’s about a father who embarks on walk across the United States to raise awareness of the consequences of bullying after his gay son died by suicide. It has a 38% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 54/100 on Metacritic. Consensus being a powerful true story let down by formulaic filmmaking. I don’t think I’ll be watching it. But anyway it means that there’s a heap of reviews, reaction, and marketing for that bloody movie that needs sifting through before getting to the good stuff like this...
Can’t read the article because it’s paywalled but the first paragraph says that the club has confirmed “foreign interest” in Joe Bell (the footballer not the movie). The journo who wrote the piece added that they’d be talking something in the range of €8-10m for him were he to leave, which isn’t exactly Neymar/Mbappe money but it would be the second largest fee ever commanded for a New Zealander after Chris Wood’s Burnley transfer (something in the realms of £16m, reportedly).
One more reason to bump the best stadium chant in world football...
He and Cacace are only the main ones. Marko Stamenic is close to cracking the first team at FC Copenhagen, one of the top clubs in Denmark. Nando Pijnaker’s Rio Ave got relegated from the Portuguese top flight last season but that might mean he moves up into their first team now. Michael Woud is already playing every week for second tier Dutch side Almere City, who were looking good for promotion last season until they fell off a cliff in the last quarter. Callum McCowatt and Eli Just (plus Dalton Wilkins, not in this squad) are at an upwardly mobile FC Helsingor in the Danish second tier. George Stanger has already played some Scottish Premiership (although Hamilton Academical also got relegated last time around). And that’s just the guys in this particular group of players. Happy days.