Sport Review reviews 2024

Sport Review #308

With all these challenging economic conditions, wars and killings that are happening, ass clown incoming presidents, vacuous and visionless politicians etc etc etc, sport can be the distraction we need, even when doing its best to ensure most of it happens on the Arabian peninsula.

To wrap things up for the year, here’s a run through my fav distractions for 2024:

Sport

• Auckland FC - everyone’s trying to process what’s happening. The wins! The full stadiums! The impotent saltiness they inspire! Best thing to happen in local sport for quite some time

• White Ferns and BLACKCAPS - both had highlights for a limited time, but what times they were. Sad to see Tim Southee wrap things up, what a champion and sad to see Tests won’t happen in NZ for the medium-long term

• Spurs - sometimes magic, especially in Manchester, sometimes dreadful, especially at home. So business as usual then, just hoping for some chequebook loosening in the window to back the coach

• America’s Cup - great that we won it. Should be such a great event, we just need 3-4 teams at Team NZ’s level and to bring it back here if we could

• Olympics and Euros - love to get immersed into a sleep-deprived Northern Hemisphere sport fest

• Rugby - Chiefs were my highlight until they weren’t. All Blacks a bit of a soap opera / attention soak at the moment, let’s see how they go next year

• Lulu Sun - her Wimbledon run was really, really exciting - extremely forceful serves and returns and looks very very mentally tough. Gutted she picked up an injury, hopefully that’ll come right in time for the ASB

Podcasts

I am very grateful for the Football Cliches recommendation, it is an extremely wonderful twice weekly gentle piss take out of shit you hear and don’t even question at the time. It always makes me laugh, there aren’t many pods that do that.

Elsewhere, it was Normal Gossip (tall tales, so good), Baseline Intelligence (too much time thinking about tennis), Search Engine (investigating important and also trivial things) and Served (Andy Roddick is a surprisingly engaging podcaster). Still love How Long Gone for rambling convos.

Locally, Juggernaut was an amazing nerd out, BYC is essential listening, with two and sometimes three people much smarter than me, and Between Two Beers are surely running out of people to interview, but I am fucking sick about Business in Between being shut down.

Reading

I made a big effort to actually spend time reading books this year, and got shitloads out of it. Couple of the favs were:

• The Rotters Club trilogy by Jonathan Coe - story of a group of friends that starts in the 70s and comes right up to Brexit, hitting all the significant events in English history in between over three books. Magical stuff, how had I missed this?

• The Bee Sting by Paul Murray - everyone said it was fantastic and they were right. Head wrecker ending

• Catching up on Charlotte Grimshaw’s Auckland stories of quite rich and also quite disturbed people living in Remuera, Point Chev and Omaha, with her family history / gossip thrown in

Screens

Probably the same as you - Bad Sisters, The Bear, Slow Horses etc etc. Very sad to say goodbye to Curb Your Enthusiasm, and we’re almost done watching the thirty million episodes of Parks and Rec on TVNZ+, don’t know what we’ll do when that’s over.

Didn’t get to the movies much, but be warned Gladiator II is good but not as good as Gladiator I. Godzilla Minus One was a high point in rewatching, as were Blood Simple, Hard Eight, A Serious Man and Hell or High Water.

Music

Spotify Wrapped told me I was in the 0.05% top David Bowie listeners, which tells you where I’m at really, along with going deep into various Eno / Fripp collaborations. New music wise I really enjoyed the Father John Misty album, and Boy Genius is still new? Kind of?

Life

Ask me after Christmas. Grateful for family, friends, friends who are also office mates, group chats, our pets, clients (big shout out clients!), cutting back on social media, mostly not drinking and getting to play tennis as much as I can.

Sport Review

Somehow 300 editions and a 20 year anniversary both happened in 2024, so that’s probably enough self indulgence for quite a while. Anyway, my fav editions this year were Best eye brows in sport, Crusaders handover.doc and Let’s build every Auckland concept stadium.

I’m extremely grateful have been recommended to sometimes review sport on the radio. As always, thanks for reading and the kind words and feedback. The out of office is going on now, but I’ll see you back in early-ish 2025.

Thanks for reading - Richard

This week's best NZ sport content

I wrap up the year’s best sport on RNZ nights, talking BLACKCAPS, White Ferns, Auckland FC, Lydia Ko and more [RNZ]

But the gang at Sportsfreak do a much more comprehensive job of sharing sporting highlights of 2024 in part one and part two. See who stuck to the one topic / 100 word count brief! [Sportsfreak]

Big interview with Dipak Patel on his tough road to New Zealand and playing international cricket, and his life in coaching since as he hangs up the ball flicker [RNZ]

George Bennett on life in European pro cycling and riding for the big teams [Rouleur]

Video nasty

Such a long way to go.

Long read

All about Netflix getting and creating shows and movies and serving them all up with an algorithm that somehow succeeds and fails badly at making sense of it all for you [Nplusone]

Recommendation 

Speaking of the GOAT Michael McDonald, track down Yacht Rock A Dockumentary - highly recommended. Help yourself to my Yacht Rock playlist!