Members End: Of no-fives and rugger buggers

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Hamilton

RICHIE McCaw spends his life on the field negotiating intricate lineout choreography and making sure he is never in the wrong place for long enough to attract the referee’s attention. Stephen Fleming timed strokes with uncommon elegance and walked the captain’s tightrope of pragmatism and principle with aplomb. How two men so soaked in the subtleties of sport could muck up something as simple as a high five boggles the mind. But they did. McCaw was supposed to high five Fleming when he walked on stage at the World Cup opening ceremony in Christchurch on Thursday. Except that one hand did not seem to know what the other was doing, and missed. They tried again. And missed again. Fleming, however, begged to differ, tweeting: “Hot spot has confirmed there was a clear touch of little fingers as hands crossed performing high 5 with Ritchie. Concede it was clumsy.” We’re not sure which is more alarming: the fact that Fleming appears not to know that hot spot is not being used at the World Cup, or that he can’t spell the All Black captain’s first name.

SOMEONE needs to tell the rest of the 4.471-million people who make up New Zealand’s population that there’s a cricket World Cup on the go. When All Black coach Steve Hansen popped along to the warm-up match between the Black Caps and Zimbabwe at Lincoln this week to have a natter with his cricket counterpart, Mike Hesson, the Christchurch Press puffed his visit on the front page. On the back page, a photograph of Hansen and Hesson loomed larger than anything on the cricket itself. In the Waikato Times on Friday, a 32-page, full colour supplement previewed the Chiefs’ Super Rugby season from every which way and then some. Cricket? It was secreted somewhere in the sports section like a scrumhalf behind a particularly large tight five.

HOW green is my outfield? If you think the grass at Seddon Park is gleaming more greenly than should be allowed as you watch SA’s World Cup opener against Zimbabwe in Hamilton on Sunday, that’s because it is. No, this is not the same thing as Louis Luyt ordering Ellis Park to be sprayed a delicate shade of spinach, or the greenkeepers at the Gary Player Country Club filling the water hazards with blue stuff that brings back memories of toilets in larney hotels in the 1980s. Instead, Seddon Park’s groundstaff have applied what officials will only describe as a “natural substance” to make the grass flex its green muscles more enthusiastically than usual. Pop-Eye would have approved.

HAMILTON Masakadza repeatedly mistook his teammates’ boarding pass for his own as he waited with the rest of the squad in Christchurch Airport for the flight that would take the Zimbabweans to play SA in their first pool match of the World Cup. Why? The game is being played in Hamilton ...

QUICK. What’s the New Zealand basketball team called? The Tall Blacks, of course. Dinkum.