Leading Edge: Sweet as a sook

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Hamilton

IN New Zealand, to call someone a “sook” is, according to www.englishlanguagehelp.info, to label them a “cry baby, wimp, big softie”.

Ah. That explains what Luke Ronchi was on about when he told the New Zealand Herald that, “‘Boulty’ (Trent Boult) gets a bit squeamy about that. He thinks things may be going on in his room. He’s a bit of a sook sometimes.”

The “things” in question are not of the kind that used to go bump (and grind) in Herschelle Gibbs’ room at any time of the day or night. Instead, Boult apparently reckons his hotel room in Christchurch is haunted. Dinkum, although it is not unheard of for wicketkeepers to talk nonsense.

Odd enough for you? If not, consider what happened to SA’s coaching staff when they thought they were quietly minding a pint and their own business on Friday evening at a pub in Hamilton known as a good spot to watch rugby and where Jesse Ryder used to fancy a drink and a punch-up.

Both qualifications would seem to apply to almost every bar in New Zealand, and now the establishment can add to its trivia trove the time a group of local women solicited Russell Domingo and his coaching crew for cash.

They did so not in the cause of anything that might have caused Gibbs to take them back to his room for a spot of bump (and grind). Instead, they were dressed as golfers and armed with driver-shaped plastic candy canes filled with jelly beans - a few of which they promised to anyone who gave them a few coins in a cause they, when asked, shied away from articulating fully.

Even so, the Saffers obliged and Domingo’s assistant coach, Adrian Birrell, was seen shelling out a few precious Kiwi dollars.

That the “golfers” may have been nudged in the direction of the coaches’ table by a couple of touring South African reporters who had opted to file their last stories of the day from the pub was neither here nor there.

Welcome to the wonderful weirdness of the World Cup, where anything can happen and often does. Before things are bent out of shape in an event we will all take far too seriously before long, remember sport is about fun as much as it is about games.

And if that makes us sooks, sweet as.