There was some uncertainty about the kick off time for the minor semi final between the Wellington Phoenix and Newcastle Jets. This means that I am rather late in getting across town to where I am going to watch the game with a good proportion of the Avon United 3rd div team.
19 mins: Goal. I have not even been able to find a seat and Newcastle Jets captain Thomson slots it home from a tight angle. Chance came from poor clearance for Sigmund and the room is dark that he has been forced into the centre of defence.
22 mins: Beautiful touch from Manny Musket skins his man but shoots straight at keeper. I am told that the Phoenix won 3-0 in both their games against the Jets this year so goals should come. Especially if Musket keeps making surging runs fifty metres upfield unhindered. But not if his switching crosses are direct passes to Jets midfielders like that.
32 mins: Goal! Tim Brown finishes a scrappy build up coolly. Loopy cross to Ifill on back post who puts it back across. Unusually for the Phoenix there is someone there. Shot blocked but played out to Brown who has the whole net to shoot at and buries it through the middle. Read the rest of this entry »
The past month has seen one frankly incredible All-Star game (The NBA’s, of which more shortly) and one which, again frankly, I didn’t actually see (the NRL’s). Apparently, according to my source, the Indigenous All Stars vs The NRL All Stars was a thing of true beauty, and as a way to kick off the season it seems like a fine idea. Maybe the promotion was a bit lacking, but baby steps, right? At least it got off the ground.
The NBA’s All-Star game is an established institution, over a half-century old, and appearances in it go a long way toward gauging the relative worth of talents from era to era. The game we saw last weekend was jaw-dropping, groin-tingling sports, with talents allowed to roam free and points piled on from all angles. They played defence and made it a game in the final quarter, so it worked as game too. It was a festival, a celebration of the sport at its most liberated. Then everyone gets back down to business and starts to run at the playoffs (even the Wizards! Three out of four since they gutted their team!).
Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking about our own venerable answer to the All-Star game, the North vs South match. Read the rest of this entry »
A few days late and dollars short as will no doubt become usual, but here’s Aaron Hawkins from Radio 1 in Dunedin and Duncan from DeadBall’s chat from Friday 12 Feb 2010 (c. 730am every Friday). We discussed the impending tedium of the Winter Olympics, railed against matey coaching, specifically as it relates to two recent appointees (Greatbatch and Crowe) from the astoundingly old ‘Young Guns’ era of the ’90s who’ve slipped back into the national side, and touched briefly on that lovely thing that happened to New Orleans a week or so ago.
Every Friday at around 7.30 in the morning I chat to Aaron from Radio 1 in Dunedin about the week in sport, and what’s to come over the weekend. It’s called, with no small amount of schoolboy-ish humour BALLS! From now on we’ll endeavour to post an mp3 of these conversations on DB on the Friday or Saturday. In typical DeadBall fashion this one’s a bit late. I’ll just post it as embaedded audio for the time being, but soon enough (probably not very soon) we’ll have it for download too, and maybe even on iTunes!
Anyway, profuse thanks to Aaron Hawkins and Radio 1 for allowing us to host this and giving us the opportunity. I’m hoping that DeadBall will be back from its slumber properly within a week or two. I’m getting married see, and it’s a bit frazzling.
This one covers such topics as the Superbowl, whether Bangldesh should be allowed to play test cricket, and why gender testing’s not what it used to be.
PS – As I used soundcloud it turns out you can download the track from now. Go do it.
In our ‘fallow period’ you missed a bunch of great Tierney. Go here to catch up.
Kim K. She’ll be behind Reggie Bush. And then later, he’ll be behind her.
High Noon At The Superdome.
Or Battle Of The Gunslingers.
Or any other ESPN-like sobriquet. I feel like Colin Cowherd right now (and kudos to him for having a media career with a name like that. The only people cool enough to get away with a name like Colin are drunken Irishmen and Barbasian cricketers).
There are two games this weekend, but while both have points to recommend them, its the NFC Championship game between the Vikings and the Saints that has story lines that transcend the NFL.
40 year old Brett Favre vs reborn gunslinger 30 year old Drew Brees.
Running backs Adrian Peterson and Reggie Bush both trying to live up to frustratingly unrealised potential.
A team that mortgaged its soul for a shot at the SuperBowl(see BrettFavre/Vikings above) vs a team that have NEVER been there. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey so I know it’s been like three months since we did anything on DB, but I’ve been busy, and the other bros have been useless*. Anyway, it was a pretty momentous night on the Street. A lot of chickens came home to roost.
Without further ado, here’s the story, inna narrative style. of how TK and Sarah came undone, with commentary supplied by R. Kelly, Pat Benetar and, uh, Joey Tribiani. Enjoy…
'Here I am, quickly tryin' to put on my clothes'
"Why do you hurt me so bad?"
"there's total silence, blood everywhere/ Confusion on their faces, as they continue to stare"
I was shocked and saddened to read of the passing of Tim ‘herbal ignite‘ Bickerstaff over the weekend. Like many, I grew up in awe of the cheerful former broadcaster and his determination to fix Kiwi bloke’s trouser problems the natural way. The way he and the New Zealand Men’s Clinic went back and forth taking shots at each other was thrilling, but they were the Goliath, with Big Pharm and an entire organisation on their side, while Bickerstaff always invited you to call him ‘personally’!
I’m sure they’ll try and struggle on with the ignite brand, but what are they without their once-impotent soldier? He was a talisman to the ‘thousands of New Zealand men’ who ’suffered in silence’ but didn’t ‘want to sleep with a syringe under their pillow’. The man just loved normal sexual function, for all men and women, and was never happier than when he was packaging it up discreetly and popping it in the post for his fellow sufferers. Read the rest of this entry »
Every week I play in a social game of football that ranges in size from four to twelve a side. It is a straightforward setup with the only limitations being barefoot play and the goals are small like in ice hockey. It used to be that we would play first to ten, but then it got to the point where even after over two hours of non stop play the score would barely sneak past three each. Sitting exhausted in the grass of Hagley Park I wondered how can so much effort go so unrewarded.
Thoughts which I am sure were echoes of what the players of Barcelona and Valencia had had the day before. Their clash on Sunday morning (NZT) was the best game that I watched this weekend. A frenetic ninety minutes of exquisitely skillful, counter thrust football. Unbelievable though, was that when Alfonso PérezBurrull blew time the scoreboard at the Mestalla still sat unchanged at 0-0. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, I haven’t been there since Katrina hit, but I’m pretty sure the bits that count (bars, titty bars, blues bars, irish bars, cajun bars, um, bar bars) are still there. They probably still have too many crap blues (is there actually anything worse? Even bad country music is more tolerable) and not enough good blues, and sadly definitely not enough people who talk like John Candy in JFK. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night two of the least famous people ever to ‘celebrity’ soundclash met at the Sale St CDJs. The crowd went mild as Cheese on Toast’s Andrew ‘Biggie Balls’ Tidball met Real Groove’s Duncan ‘Just regular sized balls’ Greive for one hour of song-for-song battling. Just so no one’s under any illusions about the magnitude of this event, it’s me, Duncan Greive writing this. No one else would be remotely interested in covering it, so I’m having to be both participant and ‘journalist’ on this one, which surely isn’t too much of a conflict of interest?
I’d spent most of yesterday trying to use fotoflexer to graft a poo onto a piece of cheese on toast. The result was truly awful, but pleased me no end:
Unfortunately this meant I had severely limited my time to actually get music together to defeat my opponent. He’d been heckling me via email about how he’d already DJed for seven hours this week (which I wrote off as big-talking but turned out to actually be true), and so was clearly match-fit, while the closest thing I’d done to DJing in the last month was messing with an iPod at my saturday poker game. Which just isn’t the same. Read the rest of this entry »
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