Fats

For Kiwi rugby fans, the main sporting news this week was the untimely and unexpected death of the legendary prop Peter Fatialofa. ‘Fats’ had moved from Auckland back to Samoa to start a business and to coach the Samoan Women’s rugby team.

Tributes flowed from all over the rugby world and the All Blacks showed the respect he was held in as they wore black armbands in their test vs. France on Sunday morning (NZ time).

Fatialofa played in a different era of rugby. He was a prop, and props in the 1980’s and early 1990’s were expected to be large, strong and tough. Fats could easily tick the box for all three of these job requirements and there are numerous stories in circulation of Fats The Enforcer. He was a big man but was also surprisingly mobile for such a large lump of granite.

It’s also fair to say that he was he was unlucky that two of the better props of the 1980’s, Steve McDowell and John Drake, kept him out of the Auckland and All Black teams of that era. When Waikato’s Graham Purvis was selected for the All Blacks in the late 1980’s, many felt that Fatialofa had been hard done-by.

Sure, in those rugby league-like days of being able to switch allegiances between countries (think Frank Bunce and Stephen Bachop  for example) he may have been able to have donned a black jersey for a while then a blue jersey later in his career. But if Fats had played a handful of games for the AB’s then sunk back into Auckland club and provincial rugby for a while, his legend perhaps wouldn’t be as grand as it is.

And that’s because for me the most memorable aspect of Fats’ legacy was helping to open the door to rugby careers for Pacific Island players. In the 80’s the percentage of Pacific Island players at the top level in NZ, and world, rugby was very low. When youngsters saw what Fats was doing in the world of rugby, they realised that this was something they could aspire to. It became even more appealing as rugby morphed from amateurism to ‘shamateurism’ to, around the time of Fats’ retirement, professionalism.

My favourite story about the exploits of Fats was told this week on Radio Sport by former All Black, and Auckland team-mate of Fats, Andy Haden.

Prior to the 1991 World Cup, at which the Manu Samoa team really put their country on the map by defeating Wales and reaching the quarter finals, Fats asked Haden to address the team at training one day. Haden spoke to the players before they became aware of a few murmurs amongst the team. It turned out that a few of the younger players wanted to follow Michael Jones’ example and refuse to play on Sundays due to their religious beliefs, which would weaken the team at the upcoming tournament. Haden said he wondered how Fats would deal with this tricky situation.

Fatialofa stood in front of the team and said he respected their beliefs. He then, without creating any offence to any of his players, asked each of them to go away and come back once they’d found the part of the bible that said they were indeed allowed to play on Sundays. Each player found a verse that they believed permitted them to play, the Samoan squad was again at full strength, and the rest of that tournament has gone down in history.

Characters like Peter Fatialofa are few and far between. He will be missed.

FastFive is the New 20/20

The sport of netball is currently attempting to move into the 21^st century where everything, apparently, has to be brighter, faster, more dramatic and simply oozing ‘entertainment’ from every pore. Netball’s attempt to enter this glitzy world is ‘FastFive’. It’s basically netball, but it isn’t…

Innovations include the introduction of a two point shot zone and a three point zone, two fewer players on each team (five rather than seven), rolling subs and a powerplay quarter for each team where all points scored are doubled. Matches have also been shortened from 60 minutes to 24.

And it actually all works really well. Games are (relatively) exciting to watch and countries such as Malawi are competitive against some of the ‘big guns’.

It actually reminds me of the early days of 20/20 cricket. Remember the match in about 2006 between NZ and Australia when NZ decided to extract the urine by sporting outstanding ‘taches, afros and the old beige kit. Aussie responded by playing proper cricket shots and smashing us. From then on, everyone started taking it a bit more seriously; especially when it became clear that a couple of seasons (6 weeks) in the newly-created Indian Premier League would mean a mortgage-free existence.

And that’s where this new sport needs to get to. Not the obscene pay-packets – that won’t happen in a sport like netball. I’m talking about taking it seriously. There needs to be some agreement with Netball Australia that they will send a full strength team in future. Most teams have selected their top players but Australia seem to regard it as a development opportunity for young players. If they send a top squad next year, the tournament will gain some respectability in the eyes of the netball world.

And speaking of respectability, those ludicrous dance routines performed by teams (and occasionally umpires!) have to stop. I know it’s all supposed to be jolly good fun as netball attempts to replicate sevens rugby in Wellington. But watching the England team sombrely sing their national anthem, then afterwards don bizarre facemasks and perform an even more bizarre dance routine was a strange experience. It doesn’t quite work. Keep the music and the lights and the costumes in the crowd. But either this is a tournament everyone wants to win where everyone plays hard and is gutted to lose (the Jamaicans were suitably unimpressed when they lost narrowly to Australia in the semi-finals) or it’s a party on the court where players are awarded bonus points for the best dance moves. It can’t really be both.

It Rolls Onward…

The All Blacks receive a lot of plaudits in the media and therefore you have to be very careful not to get carried away by jumping on the bandwagon and lumping more and more praise on them. But this team is seriously good. They’ve now won 31 of 33 games since 2011. No international team at the top level in any sport can boast a record like that.

The win this weekend in France wasn’t perfect. Indeed the result could easily have gone either way.  And, unless there’s a secret injury we’re not aware of, I though the decision to substitute Daniel Carter after 50 minutes was very strange.  But a win is a win and the French in France are a hard nut to crack. And they certainly weren’t helped by a turf that was an absolute disgrace which could easily have resulted in an injury to a player as multiple scrums collapsed as props could not get a foothold. And as for the ref … he played the advantage rule longer than any official I can remember and his penalising at scrum time as the turf gave way under the players was ridiculous. But the AB’s held on to record the twelfth win of the calendar year.

Fingers crossed the win-train can keep rolling after they cross the English Channel.

Till next time,

SG