From the Desk of the General

I don’t know how much you’re into Soviet leaders, but if, like me, you were born in the 1970s, then the man in charge of the 2nd world at the time (funny how we forget where phrases like 1st and 3rd world originate) was Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

Being a history nerd, because my dad is a historian and Mr Lyle at school was an awesome history teacher, I’m currently reading Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, which recounts major diplomatic events between 1800 and the early 1990s. We have mixed feelings about Kissinger because he wouldn’t meet my dad to discuss the involvement of the US in Rhodesia, but as books for history geeks go, it’s a winner.

Currently I’m in the Suez Crisis and Hungarian uprising in the 50s, and Khruschchev is pacing about in the Kremlin, ready to rip off a shoe and bang it on a UN desk or build a wall across a city at the slightest provocation. But I know that Brezhnev is coming soon (he ran the show from ‘64 to ‘82 - basically the entire Gen X birth spectrum) and I let myself do a little advance research. I knew that he presided over detente, the arms race and subsequent limitation treaties, the massive expansion of the Soviet military and ultimately the invasion of Afghanistan, but what I didn’t realise is just how spectacular his eyebrows were.

Just take a look at the portfolio of photographs that the wonders of Google Image search provides us:

Pictures of Brezhnev

And in particular:

Brezhnev’s thinking spot was up and to the middle

I have a slight monobrow, so I can sympathise, but isn’t this thing just beyond spectacular?

And what was Mrs B’s attitude towards that glorious expanse of fur? Sure, her husband controlled over 40,000 nuclear warheads that presumably could result in enough megadeaths (not just a seminal 80s thrash metal band, I’ll have you know) to cause the entire planet to sway to the symphony of destruction, but we all know that back at the ranch (dacha?) wives have something to say about eyebrows. Or would he just have nuked her, or denounced her, or taken care of the issue with an ice-pick? I’m a bit out of touch, but that seems to be how the Soviets resolved stuff.

And what about when he went to the barber? I can’t imagine that the post-Cuban Missile Crisis USSR offered up a Toni and Guy style experience like my friend Richard enjoys, with an amusing, talkative cross-dressing Greek Cypriot styling your hair.

I picture it being more like Costa’s and Andy’s. They have a barber’s shop right across the road from HQ. The way it works, you go in there, and a pretty angry Syrian guy forcefully jams your head forwards into a basin to wash your hair. You’re in the basin, face down, with water cascading all around you, trying not to drown, wondering if this experience is at all similar to waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay. It’s dark in there, in the basin, and the Syrian guy with his buzzcut and cutting blue eyes is manfully pounding shampoo that stinks of marzipan into your scalp, and you hate marzipan, you really can’t stand it, and a paper necklace that’s supposed to prevent hair from getting down your shirt is slowly starving your brain of oxygen, and you’re wondering if maybe next time you should go to Toni and Guy, even if it’s going to cost £20 more and you have to book. After the haircut is done, you have to get Mrs General to trim off a few bits here and there and shape it up with the kitchen scissors.  

I’m getting carried away, but you get my drift - I picture a Soyuz-1-era Moscow haircut to be not a dissimilar experience, only with a young, muscular Vladimir Putin giving you the forward head wash instead of the world’s angriest man from Syria. And I don’t think Costa’s and Andy’s would stand for eyebrows like Brezhnev’s. They just wouldn’t. They wouldn’t even offer you the option - they’d pull out a clipper and tame those beasts right back. The offcuts of eyebrow would fall like black rain in front of your face, collecting on your lips and getting sucked up your nose as you breathed heavily, still recovering from the ordeal of the forward head wash.

I guess it’s just testament to the power that Brezhnev held - neither Mrs B nor the barber felt safe enough to try to get the eyebrows under control. 

It’ll be interesting to see if Kissinger brings up the eyebrows in his book. He and Brezhnev met, after all, and surely in person you couldn’t help but be stunned by that which was above his eyes.

Brezhnev and Kissinger share a lighthearted moment, with the entire population of the world at stake

I’ll leave you with another standout image from Google Images:

Any caption would be superfluous

I’m in a bit of a hearts-on-sleeves US East Coast sort of place right now - Craig mentioned that he’s been listening to the Gaslight Anthem, so I checked them out and I like their sound. They’ve got the gritty edge and energy that I like in rock music, the kind you find in good American music that is largely absent from the UK music scene… living in London, you hear a little non-UK music, but not much, and in the UK we are taught to celebrate musical dullness in all its different guises: epic (Coldplay), delightful and wistful (Elbow), folky-jangly-Gen-Y-F-bomby (Mumford and Sons), appallingly repetitive and soulless (Scouting for Girls) etc.

Also, I’m currently reading Stephen King’s 11-22-63. In King’s On Writing, he says the trick with fiction is to think of two compelling concepts, and to explore what happens when you combine them (it’s wise advice not just for fiction but other endeavours such as businesses). In this case it’s a time travel portal combined with the Kennedy assassination. Sold. King, of course, sets his works as much as possible in his native New England, which is not the New Jersey of the Gaslight Anthem, but it’s close enough, especially as King’s little working towns tend to evoke that blue collar feel.

And back to the Gaslight Anthem: apparently lots of comparisons are drawn between them and Springsteen (the Boss is also from New Jersey, and Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem is reportedly a big Springsteen fan). On Spotify, you can jump from one band to another as quick as your brain can move (in the same way you can get lost in Wikipedia if you have some time and let yourself get sucked in), so for me it was a short hop from the Gaslight Anthem to Springsteen, and now I’m listening to Born in the USA and in a flash I’m back in 1985 at Northway Junior Primary in Durban North and 8-year-old James Barnett is running around the corridors yelling “Born in the USA! I was born in the USA! I was born in the USA… born in the USA!” - or maybe it was “Born in the RSA!” 

I can feel the cloying, comforting humidity of the summer air and see the red brick corridors and smell the sweet, alcoholic stench of the big old banda copying machine they kept in the room at the back of Mrs Morgan’s classroom. I can see us learning about the metric system with trundle wheels going click-click-click around the campus. I can see my plasticine map of Africa, with the relief the highveld and the mountain ranges pressed in by my little fingers. The papier mache bowls we made by layering wet newspaper around the black plastic bases that used to be present on 2 litre plastic Coke bottles.

Above it all there’s Springsteen’s gritty, polished song that was misused as an American anthem when really it was a protest against the way America treated the Vietnam Vets (8-year-old James Barnett might not have picked up on that irony. Or maybe he did). I guess I don’t need Jake Epping’s time portal from Stephen King’s book - the Springsteen is enough to transport me directly to 1985 (a year renowned, after all, for fictional time travel). The guy had a brother at Khe Sanh, fighting off the Viet Cong - they’re still there and he’s all gone. The up-tempo keyboard melody. The staccato drum rolls. The classic 80s fade-out done brilliantly - the song is evolving and changing even as it disappears, leaving you thinking there was more you never got to hear.

There aren’t enough epic fade-outs anymore.

Super Rugby stadium attendance is an oft-raised topic, especially in years when the Stormers are doing well and often play in front of a full or close to full house at Newlands.

Strong attendance numbers in Cape Town, Pretoria and Brisbane (I guess those are the three that fill their stadia the best? Maybe Christchurch as well?) are often contrasted against poorer numbers in Jo’burg, Sydney or Auckland.

Of particular interest to me, because I grew up there, is Durban. The Sharks command a very loyal crowd, King’s Park is easy to get to, easy to park at and generally a pretty good party. Yet, Durban is known for not filling its stadium. Even the test match against England in June did not pack out the outer, upper curves of the suicidally steep East Stand. But more about Durbs later.

Prevailing wisdom examines rugby audiences on a national basis. We all know that rugby union is the third biggest football code behind rugby league and Aussie Rules in Australia, and that cricket is the biggest sport there besides. While I was in Sydney in May, I went to watch the Tahs take on the Bulls before an average audience (around 18,000), and what was most interesting was the feel of the crowd. It was an elite audience - bankers and lawyers and doctors - not a populist crowd.

So, we tend not to expect big audiences in Australia - except in Brisbane, where (correct me if I’m wrong, Aussies) rugby league and Aussie Rules hold a little less sway than in NSW or Victoria.

New Zealand surprises because they absolutely live and breathe rugby down there. It is without doubt the national sport. Yet, their stadia are often not full (Tank Lanning mentioned that Waikato were still trying to flog 1,200 tickets to last week’s semi-final a few hours before the game).

It’s natural to consider absolute numbers in terms of stadium seats, but not in terms of the supporting population around a stadium. On TV, you see empty seats at King’s Park and you think, “What the hell, Durban? Come on man, get down to the game! Cape Town can, so why can’t you?”

It’s very easy to equate Newlands and King’s Park because they’re pretty close in so many ways. Newlands takes 51,900 and King’s Park 55,000. Cape Town’s population is 3.35m and Durban’s 2.84m (according to the CIA World Factbook). The Stormers and the Sharks are both popular teams with top quality players.

So why does Newlands pretty consistently attract bigger audiences than King’s Park?

I’ve wondered this for many years, and having grown up in Durban and attended university in Cape Town, the answer seemed obvious to me: in my experience, Durbanites tend to be more apathetic than Capetonians. They’re more likely to stay at home and watch the game on TV, or round a mate’s house around the pool/braai, than go to the stadium. 

Durban likes to underplay achievement, and to take life with a pinch of salt. It’s culturally ingrained for the place to feel a bit hard done by because the Nationalist government sidelined this English/Zulu province in favour of the highveld and the Cape for 46 years, only to be followed by a Xhosa-led ANC (in the early days of post-Apartheid at least) that had fought a low-grade civil war against Zulu Inkatha supporters in the province (Sorry, I’m a historian’s son, I can’t help but get carried away with this stuff…) When I moved to Cape Town to attend UCT, it took me a good few months to get out of (a) treating everything with a healthy dose of sarcasm and (b) being surprised that the Capetonians and folks from Gauteng and the rest of the country who I met there were genuinely enthusiastic about stuff at face value.

Anyway, I’m pleased to announce, I think I’m wrong about apathy being the main factor in the King’s Park crowd numbers, especially as it doesn’t add up when you look at the stadium experience, which is basically a big party - braais and music and a great family vibe for a few hours before the game in the practice fields that surround the stadium, and a party with live music, dancing and good times until late in the night after the game (especially if the Sharks win). It’s a famous rugby experience - and that suggests that everyone at the game is not apathetic. So are they the unapathetic minority? No, I don’t think so. 

I went to the Tahs v Bulls game in Sydney with my brother-in-law and a couple of guys he knows, one of whom was Keith Gleeson, a Sydneysider with Irish blood who played flank for Ireland. Keith made a comment that I realise now has taken two months to properly sink into the General’s crowded and ever-slowing brain: looking at the 18,000 strong crowd (Sydney Football Stadium’s capacity is 45,500) he said, “This is a pretty good crowd for the Tahs. The thing is, they should play at a 20,000 seater stadium, not here - it always looks empty here.”

At the time, I thought, “Sure, I know rugby isn’t that big in Sydney because of rugby league”. But what I should have thought is, “What is size of the rugby-following population in Sydney?”

And, last week, this came swimming back out of my murky subconscious as I pondered the Cape Town vs Durban question. We tend to assume that rugby occupies pretty much the same status in all South African cities. But what if it doesn’t? 

What if Newlands is able to draw better crowds because there are more rugby fans in the greater Cape Town area? Wouldn’t that really be the simplest explanation?

So, I’ve done some research and some maths to try put some numbers against this. Some caveats about this:

• I’ve drawn a whole bunch of assumptions
• I’ve made some hopefully vaguely fair calculations on the popularity of rugby amongst the genders and language-speaking groups, mostly because this demographic data is available and research on numbers of rugby fans isn’t (to me at least)
• The numbers that come out the other end have a large margin of error, because this is just a bru theory

Cape Town

The CIA World Factbook has greater Cape Town’s population at 3.35m. How many of these people are likely and able to go to a rugby game?

Language - It’s hopefully fair to say that the city’s English and Afrikaans speakers will be its major source of rugby fans, so I’ve included a high percentage of these citizens and a small percentage of speakers of other languages. This leaves me with 2.34m Capetonians.

Age - I’ve then portioned out the population aged 20 - 60, which I reckon is the core audience for stadium attendances. 1.94m citizens left.

Gender - I’ve made some assumptions on gender. We know that SuperBru attracts 4 males to every 1 female. I need a rough number for how many of each gender are likely to be interested enough in rugby (or the social experience around it) to go to a game. How about 1 in 2 men, and 1 in 10 women? 582,000 Capetonians left.

Availability - a multitude of factors influence whether those 582,000 can go to a game on a given weekend - prior arrangements, transport, finances, work, health - etc. So how about we say that on any given matchday, 30% of that population is able to get to the game? This leaves us 174,822 people as a potential pool of attendees.

Actual attendance - of the available pool of 174,822, not everyone is going to go every weekend, right? If 30% of the pool go to Newlands on a given Saturday, the stadium is full.

Sound reasonable?

Durban

Same exercise for Durban. Bear in mind that the city has very different demographics from Cape Town. Working backwards through the numbers, applying the same assumptions I used for Cape Town, I come to a pool of available, willing rugby fans on any given Sharks matchday of 91,634. To fill King’s Park, 60% of this population needs to go to the game.

That’s double the 30% I calculated for Cape Town. On my admittedly very broad assumptions, Durban has half the number of rugby fans as Cape Town, yet its stadium is 3,500 seats bigger than Cape Town’s. So is it any wonder, really, that Newlands fills more regularly and more easily than King’s Park? 

What about elsewhere?

Johannesburg

By the logic above, Gauteng’s massive population should easily pack Ellis Park for every Lions game. In reality, you can barely see the crowd for all the empty red seats at that stadium. However, I think it’s fair to say that the consistent underperformance of the Lions in Super Rugby combined with the awkwardness of the stadium location and the diversity of support bases in the population (many Bulls, Sharks, Stormers and Cheetahs fans live and work in Gauteng) is sufficient to overcome any natural population effect.

This is backed up by Ellis Park generally easily selling out when the Springboks play.

Pretoria

Whilst Pretoria’s population is only 1.4m, in reality, Loftus Versveld is able to draw audience from across Gauteng. Based on SuperBru stats, I’d say there is probably easily a larger physical Bulls fanbase across Gauteng than the Stormers/WP fanbase in Cape Town. They have more transport challenges, but if the Bulls are doing well people generally don’t mind making the trek, and Loftus numbers are generally good.

Australia

We’ve already discussed Australia - by the logic above, the Aussie cities will need an even greater percentage of their rugby union fans to pitch up to fill their stadia. 

New Zealand

Maybe this theory works for New Zealand too. The Cake Tin in Wellington always seems to have lots of yellow seats on show. But Kiwis are rugby-mad, right? So why can’t they fill that stadium? What’s wrong with them?

Well, the population of Wellington is 393,400. The Cake Tin holds 36,000 people. Even if we assume that rugby is 30% more popular amongst Kiwi men than South African men, and 100% more popular amongst the women, that still only produces just over 100,000 citizens in the available pool of potential stadium attendees. More than 1 in 3 of those must attend every game to fill the Cake Tin.

Backing this up

Can we find some correlation for this convivial blather elsewhere?

The TV numbers

Repucom’s stats for TV viewership as shared by Front Row Grunt suggest that a truly epic South African Super Rugby derby can pull 900,000 watchers on TV. A typical derby is around 600 - 700,000. 

How does that fit with my hokey estimates? I’ve got about 900,000 rugby followers in Cape Town and Durban combined (remember I whittle down how many of those can actually go to a stadium on any given matchday). Based on SuperBru relative SuperBru traffic, the rest of the country should inflate that number by a factor of 3.5 giving us a total of 3.15m South African rugby fans. Just under 1 in 3 rugby fans watching a huge derby on TV? Probably about right? 

SuperBru traffic

SuperBru traffic numbers should be a pretty good indicator of the relative sizes of the rugby audiences in each region. 

22% of SuperBru’s South African traffic originates out of the Western Cape, to just 7% from KZN. My demographic numbers above suggest that Durban has half the number of rugby fans as Cape Town, but it could be even more extreme - SuperBru says more like a third. For interest, 63% of our SA traffic comes from Gauteng.

Conclusion

The size of the stadia relative to the size of the rugby watching population of each Super Rugby city is not nearly consistent across the different venues. We should try not to judge a crowd by comparing it to another city, and instead judge it in its own, local, context.

General out.

References

http://www.frontrowgrunt.co.za/2012/07/sa-dominate-s15-tv-numbers/

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sf.html

http://www.elsenburg.com/provide/documents/BP2005_1_5%20Demographics%20KZ.pdf

http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/stats/2001census/Pages/Demographics.aspx

And a little healthy Wikipedia of King’s Park, Newlands, Sydney Football Stadium, Wellington and the Cake Tin

A couple of weeks back, @EOY_SA named me their business person of the week, which was very kind. They asked if I had any advice for entrepreneurs, and I said I’d pen an article on that subject on my woefully irregularly updated blog. So here goes.

The Nevado Four Phase Startup Model

SuperBru has been through quite a long journey now, from a hobby I took up in 2003 to an experimental business venture in 2006 to a formalised business in 2010. Between 2006 and 2010, it was an incubated venture at Nevado, a digital ventures and consulting group in which I am a partner. SuperBru is just one of the things we do, and the learnings below come from the collective wisdom of our experiences since 2006.

We’ve found that our ventures go through four phases as they grow and evolve. I won’t go into the details of those phases - rather I’ll focus on the key learning, which is that each phase requires different attitudes, work processes, approaches to risk, staffing, strategies, and decisions. If you bring the approach required for a mature business to a fresh startup, and your venture will never get off the ground - just as if you treat your mature business like a startup you’ll open yourself up to all sorts of unbearable risks.

This is harder than it sounds, especially if you have come from a corporate environment and/or obtained an education like a business degree; both of these will have trained you to think and act like a mature business. When you come to starting your own venture, that mentality could get you into trouble.

The mature business and the startup: polar opposites 

Broadly, I characterise a mature business as one that has:

• succeeded in defining itself (what it is and what it sells)
• found a sufficient, sustainable number of customers who want to buy what it creates
• found proven ways to make itself pay for itself

This business is likely to be slow, risk averse and rigid (don’t think these are bad things - they’re right for the age of the business.)

By contrast, your startup is the opposite. It has:

• not yet succeeded in defining itself (your business plan doesn’t count) 
• not yet found a sufficient, sustainable number of customers who want to buy what it makes/does
• not yet found proven ways to make itself pay for itself

If these characteristics are the polar opposite of a mature business, then so too should be the approach to running the startup. Rather than being slow, risk averse and rigid, the startup needs to be nimble, open to risk and flexible. 

Here are a couple of pointers on how to put this into practice. As you’ll see, they’re all somewhat related to each other - as a general motto the spirit is “try stuff, and see what happens.”

1) Ship, ship, ship!

Get your product or service out there early, then evolve it. Resist the urge to tinker until it is perfect, because you don’t know what perfect is (even if you think you do). The feedback you get from your early adopters and the experience you get from delivering your product will without doubt influence how your product evolves for the better. 

We’ve worked on ventures which have taken years (and lots of money) to build a product, only to find on eventual launch that the product isn’t quite right, or that the market for it just isn’t big enough. And we’ve worked on others (like SuperBru) where we have a constant early shipping mentality. Without fail, the latter approach has proven smarter, cheaper and more likely to succeed - warts and all.

And once you’ve shipped, go ship some more. Keep on shipping and don’t let up.

2) Move at Usain Bolt-like speed

Speed is essential to your startup. I’m not just talking about the speed of shipping mentioned in the point above. I’m talking about the general mentality of the business, particularly with regard to decision-making and work processes. 

You need to make quick decisions. They don’t need to be rash, but they do need to be quick. The startup needs to move as fast as it can to enable it to ship, and thereby to start proving itself. The speed of decision-making generally depends on the number of people involved, and the attitudes they bring. The more people, the slower the decisions, so try to keep your executive team small. And in terms of attitude, you need people who are highly motivated (having equity tends to motivate), aligned with each other and whose mindset is to be nimble, open to risk and flexible. Groupthink can kill a startup, as can a semi-interested corporate investor with different motivations from the entrepreneurs involved. Being aligned is very important.

The speed of work processes comes down to how you decide to work. Try to keep things light, and surround yourself with people who are self-motivating, smart, mature (in attitude, not necessarily age) and trusted. You don’t particularly want to be spending time managing people. And don’t employ procedure for the sake of procedure if all it does is slow you down. Procedure can (and should) come later.

3) Be a (smart) cowboy

This is about risk and about the way you work. Your nimble, like-minded decision-making team needs to be open to experimentation and risk - though in both cases the experiments must be smart and the risks calculated. A stupid cowboy will fail at the startup game just as surely as an intelligent bureaucrat.

In terms of your product or service, try to avoid over-engineering the design and the processes around it. It’s tempting to say “let me build a really robust, future-proof, extensive platform because that’ll save us time, money and hassle in the future”, and all the more so because that’s what common sense, education and corporate experience teach us, and because that’s definitely what we should do in the later stages of a business.

However, the future is a long way away, and, honestly, you don’t even know if you’re going to get there at all. If it means you can define and prove your business faster, take some calculated risks and make smart compromises on the product/service design (especially on the stuff under the hood or behind the scenes that your customers will never see anyway). Don’t fret the bugs and the teething problems, just fix them quickly. When your business has defined and proven itself, you can spend some time gradually evolving things towards that robust platform of your dreams.

Don’t do this forever

It’s a topic for another day, but I’ll sign off by saying that it will generally be a mistake to keep employing the advice above once your business has proven itself and starts growing. Phases 2, 3 and 4 of the Nevado Four Phase Startup Model each demand different approaches - and knowing when to evolve and making sure you follow through on that are often tricky challenges in themselves.

General out.

Today, during the Highlanders v Stormers game, fellow HQ partner Slacker and I experienced what’s called the SuperBru 75th Minute Reversal.

We had both picked the men from Otago to beat the men from the Mountain, and as the game wore on I became increasingly despondent that the jet lag I had expected to affect the Stormers in the second half was nowhere to be seen.

When Liebenberg was carded, Slacker and I both thought the tables would start to turn, but that incredibly organised and resilient Stormers defence held strong. As our hopes of a Highlanders comeback faded, we reached the point of the 75th Minute Reversal.

The Stormers were leading by around 15 points, which meant anyone in the 10-20 range would bag a Margin Point. However, if the Highlanders scored, it would shift to a lead of Stormers by 8 or 10 and that would spell disaster for Slacker and me as our pool was packed with picks for Storners by under 10. “It’ll be Margin Point city,” I sighed.

And so came the reversal: after egging on the Highlanders the whole game, we switched to supporting the Stormers for a final try. Our Win Point hopes were shot so it was damage limitation time - all we could hope for was as few Margin Points to get dished out as possible, and more points for the Stormers would be the safest way of pushing the result out of margin reach of the Stormers by under 10 crowd.

Then came the millimetre-close almost-try for the Highlanders. It was a tense moment for us. It was a funny thing: five minutes earlier we’d have been screaming that his boot never touched the line, but post-Reversal we were quite the opposite. No ways that was a try! Boot clearly scrapes the line!

Funny, isn’t it, how SuperBru induces these sudden, brutal changes in support?

I grew up in Durban and, sometime in my late teens, developed the kind of emotional bond with the Sharks that all sports fans know about (it’s a weird sort of thing, isn’t it?)

Last week’s pick was tough for me. The Sharks were taking on the Brumbies in Canberra and hadn’t won there since 1998. I still have memories of the bitter 2001 final where Mark Andrews sarcastically thanked the crowd for being so sporting. Lambie was out, and the somewhat erratic M. Michalak was in his place. And they’d blown it against the Tahs the week before when they should have won.

Add to this the form of the Brumbies, who seem to have turned a corner under the tutelage of Mr White (sure knows a thing or two about rugby, that guy).

So, head said Brumbies, whilst heart of course said Sharks.

It ate away at me all week, but eventually I went for the traitor’s hedge - I picked the Brumbies. Let’s define it.

The Traitor’s Hedge

Picking the opposition, like I did - Brumbies to beat my Sharks. If the Sharks had lost, I’d have felt a bit guilty about being a traitor, but at least the guilt would have been eased by my Win Point. The risk of course is that your team wins, like the Sharks did, in which case you’re the worst of everything: not only are you a traitor, but you have a big 0 in your Win Point column. The guilt takes over, and your pick the next week gets even harder… are you going to be a traitor two weeks in a row? Are you going to pick the Canes? Well, General, are you? (no, is the answer - can’t handle the guilt)

The worst part of the Traitor’s Hedge cropped up in that Brumbies v Sharks game. At the death, the Brumbies nearly won. If they’d hung onto the ball long enough, they probably would have scored. That final set of phases seemed to last forever. And deep inside the General, there was that nasty, evil little voice egging them on… “if they win, the Sharks will still get two Bonus Points… and you, self, will get one too!” The internal conflict was horrific and scarring.

The opposite scenario is…

The All or Nothing Gambit

Picking your favourite team even when you know their chances of winning are slim (Rebels fans must be familiar with this). When they go down in flames, at least you weren’t a traitor and you can sleep well at night with no blemish on your conscience. When they win against the odds, you’re golden - you’re scooping up the points, nobody else in your pool picked your team, the relative gain is huge… 

Ok, good talk. The Sharks better win this week… I couldn’t handle regretting not being a traitor…