Dual roles pass use by date
The end is close for All Blacks No 10 Richie Mo’unga, writes Gregor Paul
At some stage this year All Blacks coach Ian Foster is going to have to make a choice between Beauden Barrett and Richie Mo’unga. These two can’t continue, not consistently or indefinitely, as a playmaking partnership where the latter plays at first-five and the former at fullback.
Barrett and Mo’unga were thrown together out of necessity in 2019.
The All Blacks needed a means to break the defensive strangleholds they knew they would face at the World Cup and with Damian Mckenzie injured and none of their second-fives fitting the mould of a second playmaker, there was no choice but to take Barrett out of his beloved No 10 jersey and reposition him in the backfield.
It was never intended as a longterm initiative, though. It was a moment-in-time plan — the best, or maybe the only, way the All Blacks could set themselves up to win the World Cup.
If the international programme hadn’t been truncated to six tests, Foster would most likely have made a decision about his preferred No 10 at some point last year.
He came into the All Blacks head coaching role believing that the dual playmaking concept was a keeper, but the personnel would need to be reconsidered.
By the end of last year, certain facts became impossible to ignore, most pertinently that Barrett’s influence has been greatly reduced by wearing the No 15 jersey.
He is such a prodigious talent and consummate professional that he came home from Japan in 2019 with mostly everyone rating him the best fullback in the world. And yet by the end of last year, it was equally apparent that fullback is not his natural home.
Barrett is a player who thrives on being involved.
The more the ball is in his hands, the better he plays and the responsibility of running the game sits lightly upon his shoulders.
That fact tends to get missed, or mangled by some, who query his tactical kicking and game management.
The fact hardest of all to ignore is that Mo’unga has not developed into an international No 10 as fast, or as far, as everyone hoped
But the negativity that has slipped into the narrative about Barrett as an erratic and at times flustered playmaker is simply a result of him being unorthodox, or not quite fitting the traditional blueprint for a No 10.
In 2016 the All Blacks averaged 43 points and almost six tries a game all because Barrett brought such a devastating running game. Shredding defences with his pace is his preferred means of game management and, while his natural inclination is to run, there was increasing evidence in the last tests of 2018, when he was regularly starting at first-five, that his tactical kicking and appreciation of how to hurt teams with it, is all there.
Most importantly, Barrett has indicated to Foster that he wants to be back at No 10 and while his individual wants can’t trump the team’s needs, there’s a reality to be acknowledged that an engaged, content athlete is going to deliver more than one who feels slighted and disillusioned.
The other fact which can’t be ignored is that, unlike in 2019, the All Blacks now have other fullbacks who fit the playmaking bill.
Mckenzie is back and likely to be spending increased time at No 10 for the Chiefs this year. Jordie Barrett, too, is more composed and decisive than he was in 2019.. But perhaps the fact hardest of all to ignore is that
Mo’unga has not developed into an international No 10 as fast, or as far, as everyone hoped.
He’s been consistently brilliant for the Crusaders but his body of work for the All Blacks has been patchy.
There have been world-class moments but arguably only one world-class 80-minute performance, which came against the Wallabies last year in Sydney.
Mo’unga, in his 22 tests, hasn’t mounted a compelling case to start ahead of Barrett and if time hasn’t run out for him yet, the end is surely close.
If the July test programme goes ahead, the theme will shift from Barrett and Mo’unga, to Foster trying to answer the much harder question of Barrett or Mo’unga.
It is a question that was always going to have to be answered and unless there is a dramatic or unexpected twist, Barrett is going to be restored to his favoured position.
— NZ Herald
Abrar Zenkawi was cruising toward the beach in Kuwait City when she saw a man waving and smiling in her rearview mirror. Elsewhere, this may have been a benign highway flirtation. But in Kuwait, it’s a haunting routine that often turns dangerous. The man pulled up beside her, inched closer and finally drove into her. Zenkawi’s car, carrying her toddler nieces, sister and friend, flipped six times.
“It’s considered normal here. Men always drive way too close to scare girls, chase them to their homes, follow them to work, just for fun,” said Zenkawi, 34, who spent months in the hospital with a shattered spine. “They don’t think about the consequences.”
But that may be changing as women are increasingly challenging Kuwait’s deeply patriarchal society. In recent weeks, a growing number of women have broken taboos to speak out about the scourge of harassment and violence that plagues the Gulf nation’s streets, highways and malls, in an echo of the global #Metoo movement.
An Instagram page has led to an outpouring of testimony from women fed up with being intimidated or attacked in a country where the criminal code doesn’t define sexual harassment and lays out few repercussions for men who kill female relatives for actions they consider immoral. A wide variety of news and talk shows have taken up the subject of harassment for the first time. And one journalist used a hidden camera to document how women are treated in the streets.
The spark may have come from fashion blogger Ascia al-faraj, who vented in January on Snapchat to her millions of followers after being hounded by a man in a speeding car. In such episodes, men often try to “bump” a woman’s car, but many serious accidents result, as in Zenkawi’s case.
“It’s terrifying, all the time you’re feeling so unsafe in your own skin,” al-faraj told The Associated Press. “The responsibility is always on us. . . . We must have had our music too loud or our windows down.”
Shayma Shamo, a 27-year-old doctor, sought to seize the momentum of al-faraj’s viral video, creating an Instagram page called “Lan Asket,” Arabic for “I will not be silent.”
Shamo’s rage had been building for weeks. In December, a female employee of Kuwait’s Parliament was stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother, reportedly because he didn’t want her working as a security guard. It was the third such case — described as “honour killings” — to make headlines in as many months. The National Assembly, all-male despite a record number of female candidates in the recent election, offered none of the customary condolences.
“The silence was deafening,” Shamo said. “I thought, okay, that could happen to me, and anyone could get away with it.”
Kuwait, unlike other oil-rich Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, has a legislature with genuine power and some tolerance for political dissent. But restrictions to slow the the spread of the coronavirus prevented Shamo from staging a protest and forced her to take her grievances online, as women in the region’s more repressive countries have done recently.
The Lan Asket account thrust sexual harassment, long shrouded in shame, into the limelight.
From there, the conversation moved to traditional media. A wellknown female journalist at statelinked al-qabas newspaper went out at night with a hidden camera and captured motorbike riders recklessly trying to catch her attention, men yelling sexual slurs on the street and strangers pulling the hair of female passers-by — offering proof to millions in Kuwait of the harassment women were describing.
“It seems rudimentary, but we’ve never had these discussions before,” said Najeeba Hayat, who helped organise the Lan Asket campaign, which is also training bus drivers to report harassment, organising an ad campaign to raise awareness and creating an app that allows women to anonymously report abuse to police. “Every single girl has kept this in her chest for so long.”
As the movement gained steam, lawmakers scrambled to respond. Seven politicians, from conservative Islamists to stalwart liberals, submitted amendments to the penal code last month that would define and punish sexual harassment, including one that called for a $10,000 fine and one-year prison sentence.
“The Kuwaiti penal code doesn’t cover harassment, there are just some laws that cover immorality that are so vague that women can’t go and report to the local police,” said Abdulaziz al-saqabi, a conservative who was among those who drafted amendments.
But women’s rights activists, whose input the lawmakers did not solicit, are skeptical that the proposals will result in significant change, especially with the nation in the midst of a financial crisis and with Parliament now suspended because of a political standoff.
The frustration is familiar for activist Nour al-mukhled. For years, she and other women have struggled to abolish a law that classifies the killing of adulterous women by their fathers, brothers or husbands as a misdemeanour and sets the maximum penalty at three years in prison. Such leniency remains common across the Gulf, although the United Arab Emirates criminalised “honour killings” last year.
Kuwait also has statues that let kidnappers evade punishment by marrying their victims and empower men to “discipline” their female relatives with assault.
But progress is happening outside of official circles, activists say. In recent weeks, a growing number of female collectives have sprung up, in homes and on Zoom — a mirror to the custom of the “diwanyia,” gentlemen’s clubs that often vault men to top jobs. Women also have turned to Clubhouse, the buzzy app that lets people gather in audio chat rooms, to hold discussions of sexual assault and harassment.
The horizon for equality may be far off, but campaigners say their ambitions are modest in the short term.
“Right now, attempted murder is considered ‘flirting,’” said Hayat, one of the organisers of the Lan Asket campaign. “We just want to be treated like human beings, not as aliens and not as prey.” — AP
It’s terrifying, all the time you’re feeling so unsafe in your own skin. Fashion blogger Ascia al-faraj
The US effort in World War II was off the charts. Battles spread over three continents and four years, 16 million served in uniform and the government shoved levers of the economy full force into defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
All of that was cheaper for American taxpayers than this pandemic.
The US$1400 ($1950) federal payments going into millions of people’s bank accounts are but one slice of a nearly $2 trillion relief package.
With that, the United States has spent or committed to spend nearly $6 trillion to crush the coronavirus, recover economically and take a bite out of child poverty.
Set in motion over one year, that’s warp-speed spending in a capital known for gridlock, ugly argument and now an episode of violent insurrection.
For a year now, Americans have grappled with numbers beyond ordinary comprehension: some 30 million infected, more than half a million dead, millions of jobs lost, vast sums of money sloshing through government pipelines to try to set things right.
The toll
Once, the attack on Pearl Harbour was the modern marker for national trauma. About 2400 Americans died in the assault on the naval base in Hawaii that drew the United States into the Pacific war.
The nearly 3000 dead from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, became the new point of comparison as the ravages of Covid-19 grew.
The US reached a total of 3000 Covid-19 deaths before March 2020 was out. By December, the country was experiencing the toll of 9/11 day after day after day.
“Covid-19 now is the leading cause of death, surpassing heart disease,” Dr. Robert Redfield, then leading the Centres for Disease and Prevention, said on December 10. Looking to the weeks ahead, he said “it’s going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”
So it was, even with the vaccine rollout five days later.
With deaths now moderating — so that a 9/11 toll comes cumulatively every few days — the US death toll now has surpassed 530,000, exceeding US combat deaths of all of the last century’s wars.
A new marker looms: the estimated 675,000 Americans who died in the 1918-19 pandemic misnamed the Spanish flu.
The response
The blame game is on, exacerbated by the record of a president, Donald Trump, who rarely acknowledged the gravity of the crisis and routinely distorted it. He told Americans in March 2020 the country would be “just raring to go by Easter” and declared on the cusp of soaring infections that the US was “rounding the final turn” on the virus.
But while Trump persisted in sunny side up, he also opened the coffers on vaccine development and pandemic relief, backing $4 trillion in aid, equal to 20 per cent of the U.S. economy. And he pulled together a Star Wars-sounding effort that pretty much lived up to the hyperbole of its name — Operation Warp Speed.
Shots have risen from 48,757 the first day, December 15, to an average of 1.5 million to 2 million per day the first week of March, raising hope that a persistent bottleneck and vaccine shortages can be overcome. More than 100 million doses have been administered; 35 million people have been fully vaccinated.
Back in February 2020, when the financial markets showed strain from the pandemic and oil prices started to plunge, many economists began to predict that the US government would need to borrow sums unimaginable to older generations. Now that’s reality.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion package follows five others in the past year, altogether worth almost $6 trillion. That’s about $1 trillion more than US military expenditures in World War II — all in today’s dollars. It’s more than the government’s entire budget just two years ago: $4.4 trillion.
About two-thirds of the money in Biden’s plan is to be spent in one year, a hefty infusion that has some economists worried about inflation.
— AP