Herald columnist Chris Rattue
30 July 2010

These comments from the Auckland Herald this week, by that newspaper's resident sports 'controversialist', found their way into our mail as a rodent might find its way into your best caviar.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10661655

No offence, North Harbour, but hopefully your side will sink without trace in this year's provincial rugby competition and never be seen in any heights again. Looking at the squad list, I'd say there is every chance.

Auckland/North Harbour is a false divide anyway - this is one major city with fairly distinct regions. Having a separate team on the North Shore makes as much sense as forming an NPC team in West or South Auckland.

Either the NZRU had to dump the Highlanders and relocate the franchise to Albany, or else North Harbour needed to be scrapped.

The North Harbour concept worked fine in another era, but those days are long gone.

If the administrators won't play God, natural selection might sort the situation out.

Let's set aside the painful lack of logic on so many fronts. If North Harbour is not big enough to sustain a union, then neither is anywhere except Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, and Manukau (Counties). Or the frankly astonishing implication that teams at this level shouldn't try to foster talent from within their own unions. Or the pathetic contention that the Auckland-Harbour divide is any more "false" than, say, the divide between U.S.A. and Canada, or Scotland and England, or my house and my neighbours', or Canterbury and South Canterbury, or Ren and f**king Stimpy. Most divides are 'false' insofar as they're constructed. In fact, the whole world of sport is founded on 'false divides' between invented teams so maybe we should just get rid of sport altogether. Felcher. Okay, let's not set it aside. But now let's move on to attacking the writer's chosen career because that's more fun.

Let's take that comment about "working fine in another era, but those days are long gone". Oh dear, dear me, Mr Print Media man. And at a time when editors across New Zealand are asking themselves, "Do we charge people for online content and risk becoming read only by grumpy old men from Orewa? Or do we continue not to charge and, consequently, lose piles of cash?" It's a toughie, and it must be pretty shitty for journos to know that the advertising and sales departments are now the aorta of their institutions. Some editors have found that they've needed to take the great leap backwards toward info-tainment where their journos become sensationalist, tabloid-style ejaculators of controversy. Writers rub furiously and hope that some spunk will stick long enough to make people buy the next edition and keep them in a job. Sub-editors grant massive banner headlines (those ones that stretch right across the page) for stories that twenty years ago wouldn't have rated more than two lines somewhere near the obituaries. Trivia, opinion, and entertainment become 'news' in the hope that news without inverted commas might sneak through, guiltily and unnoticed, before the crime writers and sports columnists can re-capture attention with outlandish statements.

Most painful of all for these peddlers of tattle is that they write like they are, by and large, mind-f**kingly dim so that their audiences won't have conniption fits at the prospect of sentences with multiple clauses. Stephen Jones? Henry Winter? Anyone with an interest in sport who can write with flair, articulacy, and a sardonic glint? No? "No offence", Auckland Herald, but here's your moist towelette and tub of Vaseline - keep spanking and spraying.