A rambling, shambolic manifesto on why women are ruining rugby, Sam Casey’s piece for Rugby News is an insult to wāhine players, to the sport in general, and to everyone’s intelligence, writes Scotty Stevenson.

If Senz promised to hail a new, more enlightened era of sports talk radio in New Zealand, one of its key producers, Sam Casey, could not have hit a more off-key note with a column published this month in Rugby News. 

Said column, essentially a rambling, shambolic manifesto detailing all the reasons why – in Sam Casey’s bizarre world – women are ruining rugby, was shared yesterday evening on social media platforms. It was not just the lack of intellectual heft that left the reader wondering if this was unintentional satire of the highest order. There was also the complete disregard for grammatical convention and the tenuous grip on actual facts to contend with. 

In Casey’s version of rugby’s landscape, women are to blame for:

• Getting paid at all
• Making Casey scratch his head
• Putting their hands out
• Cancelling men’s competitions
• Having no decency
• “Seeing fit to jump up and down kicking and screaming”
• Publicly spraying NZR
• Being detached from reality
• Making the All Blacks and Super Rugby players fed up
• Short-changing All Blacks 
• Astounding Casey
• Holding “the NZR” to ransom
• Necessitating the need for Casey and others to purchase earplugs
• Constantly campaigning

and 

• Being vocal

Where to begin? It’s not as if poor construction, zero logic, and an obnoxious world view has ever stopped a columnist in his tracks before. I say “his” because we are writing this from Caseyland, where only men write columns, and long may that continue. However, in this case, every feeble argument boils down to essentially the same thing. To wit: shut up and be grateful for what you have got. 

It starts with the patently ludicrous assertion that paying women to perform the same job as men is tantamount to “hush money”. Hell, boy. Good luck getting our wāhine rugby players to hush up. Last time I looked they needed all the language skills that could muster to, ya know, convince their bosses to give them some time off to represent their country, or be a little late to the office because the contracts they had been offered required them to meet a training load that full-time professionals would struggle with. 

“Hush Money” is used for what we like to call in this business a “hook“. Unfortunately that hook has exactly no bait for the remainder of this opinion’s terrible life. From the temerity of NZR to even consider paying its best women athletes, the argument quickly descends from the heights of scatterbrain to the depths of ignorance. 

Casey believes that there is a “constant campaigning” from our wāhine rugby players for more money, that the only reason the Farah Palmer Cup continued (apparently at the expense of a number of men’s competitions) was due to their “constant noise”, and that some of these women, and in particular Alice Soper, were – knock me down and count me out – “vocal”. 

Vocal would be a start if you ask me. The fact is that many of our women in rugby don’t say a damn thing because they are scared of losing whatever small gains they have made in the last 10 years. Alice is a provincial rugby player, not a contracted New Zealand rugby player, and as such she feels a sense of freedom to champion a cause that so many others don’t feel able to champion lest the house of cards their very existence is based on comes tumbling down upon them. 

So much of this burning haystack of hysteria is based on the notion that our women aren’t revenue earners. This is where the one scintilla of sunlight alights upon the otherwise permadark prose. I’ll tell you why that is: because columns like this continually subjugate the women’s game to the point where it is seen as tokenism to even show a modicum of interest. And that idea dies hard. As does the idea that all sponsorship money should be centrally controlled rather than ring-fenced for purpose. 

Women’s rugby is not a revenue earner, but it could be, if only opinions like this had the good grace to just fuck right off. Profitable, no. But it is an investment. And you best get used to the idea that this investment must continue to increase.

Apparently, “the All Blacks and the Super Rugby players of this country are well and truly fed up”, which would be a hell of a story if any of those brave souls all earning good money and having the ability to access the buffet of athlete services women could only dream of came forward to corroborate this point of view. If by All Blacks you mean the guy you ate McDonald’s with in a stranger’s house then by all means, let’s hear from him. Actually, let’s hear a single All Black or Super Rugby player on this matter. I’ll wait. 

There’s another argument, more twisted than a pretzel, in which Casey uses the Covid-induced restructure of New Zealand Rugby as an example of what women should have been thinking of instead of themselves. He provides, as a counterpoint to the “demands” that the Farah Palmer Cup continue in straitened times, this furious point: “Need I remind you that during that time, hardworking kiwis employed by NZR were losing their jobs.” Yes, this is true. And many of them, in what will come as no surprise to anyone, with the possible exception of Casey, were women.

Casey continues to mangle pronouns and syntax for approximately eight hundred ill-judged words before blaming women for the departure of poor Ngani Laumape who has taken up a highly paid contract in another country. And he implores us all to castigate our women, most of them unpaid, for forcing this great midfielder, who has enjoyed a six-figure salary and attendant capped All Blacks bonuses for most of his career, offshore. 

There is at one point a command to “read that point again, just to make sure you understand how detached from reality you are”. I would have thought this was great advice for the author. The reader will make her own mind up. 

Historically, Black Caps tragics have not had an easy time of it but today’s result confirmed how dramatically that had changed. Now, finally, is the time for unbridled joy, writes Samuel Flynn-Scott. 

Drifting in and out of a fitful sleep, I stopped resisting and picked up my phone one last time. I missed the winning runs, the result of a partnership between our two greatest test batters, by maybe a minute but watched live as Virat Kohli embraced Kane Williamson like a proud but mortally wounded sensei, regretting only that fate had placed them on opposite sides in this battle to the death. Maybe the death-battle part was in my head, but that’s what test cricket can feel like: brutal, tense. And the World Test Championship final was as tense as any, for every single over that managed to be bowled under the dark, weeping English summer skies. 

My cricket chat is like an emotional support group. A place where frothing obsession is completely acceptable and enabled. As I opened it at 5.30am this morning, it seemed only one of the gang was conscious. “I can’t believe you guys aren’t watching this,” Jay had opined at 3am. 

Jay and I watched the 2019 final together and he drove me to The Spinoff HQ straight after that bizarre, soul-crushing defeat to record the most depressing podcast of all time. Does this win compensate for that loss? Yes. It’s better. This is test cricket. This is five (six, even) days of perseverance and toil. For our group of greying-at-the-edges cricket tragics, this is the pinnacle. I hope Jay gets some sleep today. He deserves it, and to me he is as much a hero as any of the Black Caps. 

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There was so much talk about bowling choices leading into this game. Would India play two spinners? Who would New Zealand leave out of their stunning and stacked fast-bowling armoury? Both sides made bold choices. India confidently chose their dual talismanic spinners despite all indications that this would be a seamers’ paradise. New Zealand went with four seamers and a medium-pace all-rounder. It proved the difference.

There was little doubt who would be the player of the match. Kyle Jamieson has been a revelation in the past 18 months. The world’s greatest batters find their bats befuddled by his extra bounce and unwavering line and length. After eight tests, he has an improbable bowling average of 14 in what is the greatest start to a bowling career in over a century (I think, don’t Google my stats, it has been a big week with a lot of Cricinfo articles). Jamieson outsmarted Kohli twice, and the importance of that cannot be overstated. Our new guy destroyed perhaps the greatest batter of his generation. 

I could go on about the whole bowling unit but I’ll spare you. It’s revealing, however, that they are all bowing so well that no one is dominating the wicket hauls. There simply aren’t enough wickets to go around, when every bowling change brings a wicket or two.

Batting in this test never looked easy for either side – except perhaps for the last hour, with the sun shining and a Black Caps win nearing inevitability – but it’s telling that we kept Jasprit Bumrah wicketless on a seaming pitch with conditions overhead perfect to swing the Dukes ball. Devon Conway’s 54 in the first innings further proved the extent of his talent, but, crikey, how about Williamson’s defiant first-innings 49 off 177 balls, as the team fell away around him? And because Kane is able, he followed up with a second-innings unbeaten 52, full of elegant strokeplay, to guide his team home. It was something else. He is so cool in his defence, he is the human ice-block. 

With BJ Watling retiring and Ross Taylor nearing the end of his career, this was as fitting an era’s climax as possible. While the mighty 1980s team, featuring prime Richard Hadlee and a young Martin Crowe, gave way to the grim 1990s, I don’t see that happening now. With the emergence of Jamieson, Conway, Will Young and Tom Blundell, not to mention the likes of Rachin Ravindra waiting in the wings, we aren’t about to fall off a cliff of no-depth. 

The best thing that could come of this would be more test matches. The Blackcaps are so often relegated to two-test series, while five-test Ashes behemoths lumber on year after year. Just imagine where Williamson’s stats would be if played as many tests as Joe Root.

Home-track bullies? Big-game chokers? ICC tournament also-rans? No, you haters, we are the champions. And in the greatest format of the sport. The Blackcaps have beaten India, the giants of world cricket, with vastly greater resources than we could ever hope for. Australian test captain Tim Paine went on the record ahead of the final to say India would beat us comfortably. 

Eat a peach, Tim. We beat them convincingly.