Field Theory by Hadyn Green

Christmas is a time of insatiable need, where consumers turn into frenzied piranhas, skeletonising the ox carcass of consumable goods. I do not see myself as anything but piranha #47 happily attacking the flesh, or at the very least pointing out to my piranha family the bits I'd quite like to have if they wouldn't mind getting it for me.

I believe my analogy died somewhere in there.

Beyond the cool stuff that teases me with enticing winks from Uncrate, Threadless, Sneaker Freaker and various cool gadget blogs, there are the one off that people send me or that I happen across. These are usually sports related, more specifically, uniform related.

Pretty Pretty Pretty sent me some very cool tshirts via twitter. The Novel-T World series has the uniforms for a baseball team of literary characters. Naturally the captain is Ahab who pitches to the catcher Moby Dick.

After that I discovered that the pun wasn't exclusive. Novel Tees make tshirts for businesses that only exist in fiction such as High Fidelity's Championship Vinyl.

There's an interesting category of sports shirt that shows your support but also conveys your sense of annoyance at recent changes to said team. For example the shirt that's been on my wishlist for a while is this Meats shirt (for those who don't know it's a facsimile of the NY Mets).

Then there is the very famous shirt that arose from the creation of CitiField: a stadium that was built to house the Mets after the old Shea stadium was demolished and is named after bailout-requiring company CitiBank. "I'm calling it Shea". The New Zealand equivalent would be "I'm calling it Lancaster Park". The shirt has been seen on national television and has numerous spin offs for other corporate-whored-out stadia.

I'm not even going to get to beautiful sneakers.

Something that strikes me about these alternate versions, is that the style of sports uniforms (especially baseball) resonates as actual fashion. But they are always used in a way to convey support.

If I were to say that to you in person I wouldn't look confident. I said before that I find the hordes of people in Yankees caps ridiculous. Worse is the sudden surge in Pittsburgh Pirates caps, where you just want to ask the idiots: "do you know what the hell you're wearing?" In a similar category people wearing mismatching sports team's apparel.

Pffft, kids these days.

I was thinking about all of this as I was jostled about in what would become the mosh pit at Pearl Jam's Auckland concert.

As you can see from Lisa's brilliant photograph above, Eddie Vedder is wearing a Walter Payton throwback (Chicago Bears); a fact I geekily mentioned to my partner who was much more interested in Mr Vedder at the time. But Eddie's shirt while having the correct "GSH" (George Hallas' initials) on the sleeve was missing the name and number on the back. So it wasn't an actual jersey it was just a cool t-shirt.

And Pearl Jam seem to like the look. For their concerts this year every tour stop had its own unique t-shirt based on a local sports team. Seattle had this amazing Seahawks shirt:

That's the back, the front had a larger version of the altered Seahawk logo. And while 21 was the date they played (September 21) it's also a pun on the usual Seahawk fan's jersey with 12 on the back (in Seattle the famously loud fans are the 12th man).

For the record at the Auckland concert it was a version of the Auckland Blues jersey. The concert was held at Mt Smart, possibly for irony.

By the way any of the above links are purchasable and can be sent to me c/o Public Address. Go Team Piranha!

1. Everyone has an idea
2. Nobody likes anybody else's idea
3. The group must come to a decision

Given these three conditions it seems inevitable that whatever that final decision was, that it was going to be a complete cock-up. An anonymous fly on the wall has informed me that the meeting was "frosty as fuck" and several unions' CEOs may have had some unrepeatable words with each other while the NZRU were out of the room.

This is the environment we're in. Everything is about the dollar and the only competition that's seen as bringing in that money to the unions is the NPC (in whatever form it takes).

The only way rugby unions can survive is with the sponsorship dollars that comes from nationally televised games and the larger crowds. And because of that, suddenly every team has a right to be in the top division.

Teams that have struggled recently to compete both financially and on the field suddenly decide that they can win if they go to court instead of sucking it up and really competing in the second division. This action basically kills off any idea of promotion/relegation, an idea that it seemed everyone liked (until it was their team being relegated).

So now we have a system where everybody wins and so (naturally) everybody actually loses. No wonder Canterbury's red shirts do so well, it's COMMUNISM!

I see only one way out of this: make Dan Vettori the head of the NZRU. The boy is a born multi-tasker.

If you were watching rugby for the first time you'd think that it was a strange game where the players just flop over the ball until someone passes it or the ref blows his whistle. Football would be easier to pick up, until someone was offside. And roller derby looks like a bunch of girls in frilly panties skating fast and hitting each other. And some terrible sports reporters might think just that.

The 174-88 score line of Skate Highway One suggests something different.

New Zealand's first intercity bout featured Auckland's Pirate City All Scars [sic] and Wellington's Richter City All Stars. Richter City had agile jammers with amazing acceleration. The Pirates came with solid and well-drilled interplay between their blockers… and agile jammers with amazing acceleration. Guess who won.

Richter City's blocking has been progressing over the season but their accomplishments were for nought compared to the combinations the Pirate's skaters had built up over the years. Channels would open up for Pirate's jammers and skaters like Fia Fasi Oi ("Do you want a hiding?" in Samoan) would be through the pack before the third turn.

Pirate City also had a clear game plan that they executed straight away: get the lead jammer position, score points, stop the jam (the first jammer through the pack without cheating is the lead jammer and can call off the jam at any time). This meant that the score went up in small increments to start as the teams felt each other out. But one thing was clear for Richter City, scoring points was going to be difficult if they didn't have that lead position.

The Pirates were so ruthless they would kill the jam even if they hadn't scored themselves. The home team was so strangled by this tactic that it was fourth jam before Richter City got points on the board. The Pirates combo of Little Miss Evil, Spar Kill, and Fia Fasi Oi (easily the MVP) were racking up points like it was pinball, while Pieces of Hate and Lucy in Disguise controlled the pack.

That's not to say they had it all their own way. Richter City clawed back some of the Pirate's lead. Punk Panther especially stood out scoring some big points off power-play jams (where the opposition jammer is in the penalty box) and MEOW and Tuff Bikkies were blocking stand outs, described later by the opposition as "downright annoying". Suffer Jet had her sneaky shoulders in the mix too.

And the crowd of over 1,200 didn't quit either. When Richter got their first lead jammer the stadium shook with energy. Visiting MC Mic Riot told me later that the reaction blew him away. This wasn't some sad sack rugby crowd who would leave if their team got behind. They were there to stay and scream until the end.

The Wellington skaters kept a sense of humour too. Even forty points down Bikkies couldn't help a cheeky wave to a Pirate being sent to the box. And MEOW started dancing with Scheisse Minelli between jams. Again cementing the fact that while the hits are big, everyone's friends in reality. Even the "bad guys". The crowd had great pleasure in booing Skate the Muss (with a tasteful "cook me some eggs" t-shirt) when she was sent to the penalty box.

I really want to emphasise how impressive the level of skating was all around. Even though the score was a blow out the two teams were skating amazingly. Fia Fasi Oi was incredible and I don't think I saw her fall over once. In fact I remember seeing her get hit, spin regain control by skating sideways and the carry on at full speed.

Perky Nah Nah gets the medal for heart. She took a skate to the thigh in an early tangle and got up and kept skating (I touched the bruise after the bout and it was an impressive lump). Then in the second half she took a painful tumble and as she was getting up another skater couldn't get out of the way and kneed her in the head. Helmets, mouthguards, and knee pads: not just for show.

And all of this is the just the start of the intercity bouts. There are two leagues in Taranaki, a league in Christchurch, a league in Hamilton and a Northland league (with rumours of a Tauranga league starting up). By next year it could be a full national tournament. And you'll want to be there for that, though you may want to view the after party from a safe distance.

Here are the photos from Mike and Jed (as always copyright is all theirs). I suggest going to their galleries because they have some amazing shots there.

And yes this one isn't of skaters but it's my favourite of the night:

So not the best weekend then. New Zealand lost to a rag-tag bunch of misfits who banded together under a common goal and wore mismatched socks. In a different sport we lost to a team that hasn't been home for a while now. And our pool has the current World Champ in it!

My pool prediction didn't come to pass, and I owe Graeme Edgeler a beer, but I still think we did alright. We ran Italy close earlier this year and Slovakia and Paraguay could possibly stoop to our level. You know I think we might have a chance.

And as we've noted here before, football's low scores are what makes it the sport that has the highest percentage of "upsets" (defined as a team beating another with a significantly higher win/loss ratio). Though I can't help but feel sorry for North Korea (Brazil, Cote de Ivoire, Portugal). I'm sure their newspapers will blame the draw on the US or something.

Australia's pool will be pretty close (Germany, Ghana, Serbia) but they've got to like their chances of progressing.

Now this post is intentionally on popular sports so that no one will complain when I write about Roller Derby next…

I wasn't quite sure what was supposed to happen. But the players did, they all took a knee, so did the referees, so did all the players on the bench and the bench managers. Someone was injured, and it was something I hadn't seen before because it doesn't happen in Wellington. But this was Pirate City, and they roll tough.

The venue demanded a harder skating style. Set into the base of a hill was Skateland. The rain started as we pulled into the carpark and wandered inside. I was the only person wearing a tie.

Skateland's floor is concrete and its roof is low. The MCs are difficult to hear over the referees' whistles and crowd's shouting. The beers, brought around by "wenches" are in cans, and slightly warm.

MC Mic Riot tells me that it used to be an outdoor venue that they just built a roof over. And it does have a feel like that. If this was a rugby field there would be cars parked on the sideline.

The whole feel is tougher and grittier. Like the difference between a sports car and a hotrod or the difference between being punched and being punched with knuckle dusters.

After a tight first half Dead Wreckoning pulled away from Mascara Massacre and ended the three bout series with a clean sweep. Afterwards Wreckoning's manager, Pieces of Hate, was unimpressed with the result. It should never have been that close, Wreckoning should've wiped the floor with them.

Even with the game over and the shield in hand the aggression was still there. Then again after being stuck on the side line maybe Hate was just itching to pop someone. So it wasn't a good time for me to start an argument with her. It was about uniforms and I won't go into it, but just to say that neither of us backed down and in the end we just made the skater in the middle (Schiesse Minelli) feel awkward.

So now this marauding band of no-goodniks are heading to Wellington for the country's first intercity bout: Skate Highway One (puns are as much of a staple of this sport as they are of any other, derby girls are just more blatant).

I've seen the team lists and I'm worried that Auckland are going in with a clear size advantage. I don't know if Wellington is going to have the blockers to cope with the hitting power that Pirate City is bringing down. Richter City's saving grace might just be their speed and agility. It's definitely going to be a good bout and hopefully no one gets seriously hurt.

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And congrats to LegBreak who will be tweeting on behalf of our nation on the Guardian website (@Sportzfreak) during the drawing of the FIFA World Cup groups.

I did some "analysis" over at the Dropkicks on this:

Based strictly on current world rankings [the best group for NZ would be] would be in Group A with South Africa (86), Ghana (37), and Slovakia (34).

The worst would be Spain (1), Cameroon (11), and Portugal (5).

I also predicted that one pool would be: Argentina, Japan, Nigeria, and Serbia, if anyone would care to wager a beer on that.