🏉 New Zealand’s Black Ferns need more balance to defend their World Cup title

My Week in Sport(s) 🏉 ⛳️ ⚽️ 🏀 🎾

May 09, 2025

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

Covered in this edition: 🏉 the Black Ferns, ⛳️ Rory McIlroy, ⚽️ Pedri, 🏀 Rudy Gobert and 🎾 Iga Świątek.

🏉 New Zealand’s Black Ferns need more balance to defend their World Cup title

For a sports team, a mythology can be a dangerous thing. When the Black Ferns’ current director of rugby was appointed in 2023, he painted a clear picture of his expectations. “We talk about our DNA,” Allan Bunting said. “We were born to attack.”

New Zealand’s women are the Rugby World Cup holders, but definitely not the world’s strongest team — in the 15-a-side game, at least. Since they won the trophy in 2022, they have lost six of the 15 games they’ve played against other top nations — defined here as those countries which have qualified for the WXV 1 competition in either 2023 or 2024. In contrast, England — the favourites they turned over in that final, in fortuitous circumstances — are a perfect 19 wins from 19 over the same period.

It’s not with ball in hand that they’ve been outshone by the Red Roses. New Zealand certainly live up to Bunting’s mantra: they offload the ball more frequently than England, generate almost as many clean breaks from their attacks and gain more metres on average every time they carry the ball. Rather, their issue is how reliant they are on that running game to progress upfield: the Black Ferns have gained 66% of their metres by carrying the ball over this period, according to Rugby.com.au data.

This figure is way ahead of all their peers. England have the next highest share of metres made with ball in hand at 52%, while other top-ranked teams like France and Canada deploy their kicking game much more effectively than their running game. In five of those six defeats since 2023, New Zealand ran the ball further than they kicked it upfield; in all six — three losses to England and one each to France, Canada and Ireland — they kicked for fewer metres from hand than their opponents.

It’s not fair to call a team with such a range of attacking weapons predictable, but their commitment to this approach has meant coming up short against more robust defences. To his credit, Bunting has now recognised that the Black Ferns need to “play other styles of rugby, too, and evolve with the world.” With only five fixtures before their World Cup opener, though, they don’t have much time to implement tactical changes. Their 2025 campaign kicks off tomorrow — and every game counts.

⛳️ It didn’t take a once-in-a-lifetime performance for Rory McIlroy to win his fifth major

What will the golf media talk about in the lead-up to next week’s PGA Championship? Rory McIlroy’s win at Augusta last month concluded one of the sport’s dominant storylines: whether the Northern Irishman would ever complete a career grand slam.

The final round of the 2025 Masters was as dramatic as any Sunday the venue had seen in recent memory. If you step back, though, McIlroy’s week resembles many of his other recent performances at majors. According to Data Golf, he gained slightly more than 4 ‘true’ strokes per round on the field at Augusta — a level he’s matched or bettered several times since 2015. (For reference, 20 of the previous 40 men’s majors had been won by a player who averaged less than 4.5 True SG per round.)

Of course, it was the distribution of those strokes gained that was crucial. At the 2022 Masters — where he also gained 4.1 True SG per round — he entered the final round 10 shots back before torching the field to finish second. This year, he played so well in his second and third rounds that he had some breathing room going into Sunday; as a result, he survived a below-average final round and still got into a sudden-death playoff with Justin Rose. Do you need me to tell you what happened after that?

What else I learned last week

⚽️ Pedri’s passing has taken another leap in the second half of 2024-25

Over the two legs of Barcelona’s recent Champions League semi-final tie, Pedri had a slightly tougher time than usual setting up his teammates. In 186 minutes of football, his passes assisted shots worth only 0.2 xG in total — about half his usual rate of xAG.

That shouldn’t detract from the astonishing season he’s having on the ball, though. When we last checked in, it had become clear that Hansi Flick was positioning him more conservatively in midfield this season. He’s stayed closer to his own goal since La Liga’s winter break, but has also started moving the ball into dangerous areas even more frequently. In his last 14 league games, Pedri has averaged 3.3 passes into the penalty area per 90 minutes — up from a rate of 1.8 per 90 minutes before Christmas.

🏀 Rudy Gobert is still struggling to stay on the floor in the playoffs

Last April, when I looked at how much time the NBA’s top players spend on the court during the postseason, the Minnesota Timberwolves’ French centre Rudy Gobert stood out — for the wrong reasons. 12 months on, things don’t look too different.

Despite some dominant moments, so far in this year’s playoffs Gobert is averaging under 30 minutes per game for the first time since 2016-17. Foul trouble might be one factor: while he has reduced the frequency at which he commits personal fouls with each successive season in Minnesota, every year when the postseason comes around that rate tends to tick upward. In 2023-24, Gobert committed 0.6 more personal fouls per 36 minutes in the playoffs; in 2024-25, that gap has increased to 1.0 fouls per 36.

🎾 Iga Świątek is still struggling for form — even on her favourite surface

Iga Świątek went into last year’s French Open — contested on clay, the surface she has tended to dominate — at an all-time peak, according to Tennis Abstract’s Elo ratings. The situation approaching Roland Garros this year is rather different.

Since 2021 — the year after she won her first French Open title — Świątek has claimed victory in at least one of the WTA Tour’s other clay-court events played in the build-up to Paris: Stuttgart (2022 and 2023), Madrid (2024) and Rome (2021, 2022 and 2024). In 2025 — having been bounced at the quarter-final stage in Germany and the semi-finals in Spain — she only has one chance left to continue this streak. Falling short in Rome this week would make it four straight clay tournaments without a win.