Confessing the worst sports predictions of 2009

Australian batsman David Warner strikes the third of his 6’s against South Africa during the KFC Twenty/20 match at the MCG in Melbourne, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009. (AAP Image/Joe Castro)

As the time of the year rapidly approaches where we take time to reflect on all things good and bad over the past twelve months, it seems the perfect time for me to cleanse the mind of all those seemingly confident and assured predictions made this year on The Roar.

So where do I start?

Well, back in January, I said that I thought Brit tennis star Andy Murray – who I also dubbed “the next Tim Henman” – was a good chance of winning the Australian Open in Melbourne.

In true Henman style, Murray crashed out of the round of 16 in five sets to Spaniard Fernando Verdasco, who in turn ended up losing his semi-final to eventual winner Rafael Nadal.

So I was a little way off, but I’m claiming two degrees of separation as a moral victory.

Around the same time in January, I wondered if New South Wales slogger David Warner might have had his 46 balls of fame (89 v South Africa in a Twenty20 international at the MCG), and that his modest returns immediately following that amazing display might have brought the experiment to an end.

Well, Warner did get left out of several ODI games after I posed this question, but has in the last four or five months found his way back in the Australian Twenty20 side at least, and seems to be back in vogue.

He still hasn’t really repeated that 89 in Australian colours, but did show some glimpses for NSW in the Champions League Twenty20 in October. I maintain the question still stands, but I guess his fame flame is still flickering.

The Super 14 season had been going a bit over a month when I suggested of the Queensland Reds that “they’ll be the big improvers this season”, and followed that up with “Their rise up the table will almost certainly be reliant on the form and fitness of young Wallaby playmakers Berrick Barnes and Quade Cooper”.

Not only were the Reds nowhere near the “big improvers”, but they barely rose up the table either. Barnes (when fit) and Cooper did their very best to steer the Reds around the paddock in 2009, and while they played some unbelievably good rugby at times, they remained more inconsistent than even the Wallabies.

Unfortunately, 2010 doesn’t necessarily look much better for Reds fans, with coach Phil Mooney being sacked and replaced with Ewan Mackenzie, but worse, playmaker Barnes has defected to arch-rivals NSW.

Late March saw the first public airing of my view that the cricketing calendar has no room or real need to keep playing Twenty20 International games, and that we should just leave the shortest form of the game to the various domestic and franchise comps.

And while my thought did, and continues to get, good support for the ridding of T20Is, its demise is no closer.

In fact, with a second Twenty20 World Cup to be played within 10 months of the last, in the Caribbean in April/May, its demise is probably further away than ever.

This, however, is one currently dud prediction that I will keep hold of; I still cannot see the need for international Twenty20 cricket.

Come July, all thoughts turned to The Ashes series in England, who would win, and exactly how much sleep I would manage to get over the course of the next eight or nine weeks in the lounge camp.

As far as predictions went though, I could only be drawn as far as saying it would be a 2-1 result, without nominating a winner.

I’m sure it was Karma getting back at me for sitting on the fence, in delivering the 2-1 series win to England.

Mind you, I’ve done better than The Roar’s English cricket correspondent, Alec Swann, who told us to “Put the house on Australia” just before the deciding Fifth Test at The Oval.

Alec’s only been heard from occasionally since making this bold forecast, and so in his assumed homeless English winter state, I’ll clear this prediction for him.

In September, after the England and South African cricket boards announced that they would be shortening domestic one-day cricket to 40 overs, I suggested that it would only take another couple of national boards to make the same move to force the ICC to do the same, expecting that those national boards would follow suit within weeks or maybe a month or two.

Three months later, the only nations to have shortened one-day cricket are … England and South Africa.

The week after the Wallabies belted South Africa in Brisbane and had us all loving them again, I wrote “the true test of this team comes this weekend against the All Blacks in windy Wellington.” That wasn’t so much a bold prediction as it was a harsh reality.

And the Wallabies got me again last month when after accounting for England and drawing with Ireland, I told a couple of mates via email that “Scotland would do well to beat Randwick currently …”

Randwick is a very good team, it turns out!

Any cleansing of dud predictions should include my suddenly disastrous A-League tipping this season too, where after somehow reaching the lofty heights of the top 10, I’ve started descending back to where I belong.

For that I need to thank rounds 8 and 14 where I returned naught from six available points. Highly commended awards also go to rounds 5, 6, 9, 11, 15, and 16, in which I managed just the one point.

I really don’t know what makes me, or anyone, so confident to think these predictions can be made with some kind of authority. The Roar this year has been inundated with predictions that were so wide of the mark you wonder how the predictor ever dreamed of it.

But nevertheless, predict we do, and predict we will again, and to hell with the outcome should we be proven wrong!

And so before I get to 2010 I must now cleanse the conscience, rid the mind, and say ‘be gone, dud predictions’. You are well and truly dead to me now.

Over to you Roarers, cleanse away …