29th July, 2010

Soccer:

Time for a debrief on New Zealand’s magnficent, unbeaten run in the 2010 FIFA World Cup.  Just over a week ago a crowd of somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 - and that’s big by New Zealand standards, but well short of the 40,000 anticipated - lined the streets of inner city Wellington to pay tribute to less than half the 23 man squad who could make it.  Captain Ryan Nelsen was amongst those not in attendance,  hearing neither Prime Minister John Key gush ‘way to go All Whites, you’re the champs’ nor coach Ricky Herbert’s more measured “I take my hat off to them, they’ve been extremely dedicated, loyal to the cause”.

ESPEN experts rated Nelsen good enough centre back to make a fictious ‘dream team’, a World Cup First XI as it were.  Can we really trust ‘experts’ from America though?  What the hell do they know about soccer?  Could European experts come up with an all time greatest grid iron team?

For the record New Zealand played three games in pool play, drawing all three. Slovakia and Italy - the defending champions, no less - were held to 1-1 and in the last game against Paraguay neither side troubled the scorer.

New Zealand claim the record as the only undefeated side at the cup.  They also had fewest shots at goal and the fewest corners awarded any team.  They didn’t win a single corner in either of their last two matches.

It would fair to say in balance then that they were a defensive side who played massively to their own strengths, threatening to neither win or lose.  Whether you find this a matter of rejoicing is up to personal taste.  Personally I find the celebrations a little over the top, akin to laps of honour taken by English rugby sides when they lose to the All Blacks by less points than anticipated.

Gay netball coach sacked:

The Middleton Grange school in Christchurch hit the headlines recently for sacking their netball coach on the grounds that he was a homosexual.  The Board of Governors of the Christian school have been ordered to attend a Human Rights awareness course as a result.  An undisclosed sum will be paid in reperation to the gay 28 year old whose termination of employment was entirely based on biblical prohibitions of his sexuality.

It is of course a measure of how seriously we take our netball over here.  If we don’t maintain standards there’s a danger that netballers will end up playing like a pack of women.  How could we possibly hope to take on the likes of Norma Plummer with a gay boy in charge?

A friend of the victim made the not unreasonable point that the teacher’s homosexuality did, if anything, lesson the chances of him leading students astray. “He was teaching a shoolgirls’ team - he’s gay, what interest is he going to have in girls?”

The incident has some surface similarities with a case a few months back of an Exclusive Brethren school who fired a teacher for teaching Shakespeare’s “King Lear”.  Suzette Martin, 40, was sacked from the private Westmount School in Kerikeri for teaching her Year 13 students from a modern version of the play.  Martin was in violation of her contract which explicitly stated that anything put before students had to first be cleared through the school’s board of governors. The contract also forbade Martin to encourage any of her charges to go to university or any other tertiary institution.

The school committee found that the modern text was “embarrassing, corrupting and morally defiling”.