I’m half way through reading Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner‘s book Freakonomics. The book is tagged with the line “A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”.

Levitt poses the weirdest questions, which he already knows the answers to, such as:

1. What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
2. How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?
3. Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?

I can’t help thinking he would be able to provide a great answer to this question:

What do National (and the Mt Albert bi-election) and the All Blacks have in common?

Here are my attempts:

A: The points differential between the All Blacks and France nearly represented the percentage of the vote that Melissa Lee won as a National candidate for Mt Albert.

The 5 points difference divided by the 27 points scored by the French equals 18.5% which is close to the 17% that Melissa Lee scored in Mt Albert. Whether this is relevant is a moot point but I feel clever having made the calculation.

A: Quoting from Stuff “…The All Blacks’ inexperience was also badly exposed. As ever they were rusty in their opening hit-out of the campaign, but they made numerous errors and never showed the composure needed to withstand the sort of assault the French dished up.” Swap every instance of All Blacks with Melissa Lee, and every instance of ‘French’ with Labour and the Mt Albert story is identical.

Perhaps the only difference between the National Party experience of the bi-election and the All Blacks experience at Carisbrook will be that tomorrow morning Graham Henry will front up and defend his team (without making excuses) whereas John Key will try to ignore and bury the fact that he hand picked Melissa Lee and that he left her high and dry with no support.

Graham Henry revved his team up at half-time. That was never the case for Melissa from John Key. He coached in absentia. You will never win a game like that.