NZ expansion candidates for Australian competitions

The selfish purpose of the NZ expansion teams is to enlarge the TV audience for Australian competitions. NZ benefits from a heightened level of play, but our domestic competitions are at risk of being cannibalised in the process. The Australian leagues have to also become our primary domestic competitions (as far as the Aussies let us), so we need to expand our currently token presence there. On a raw population ratio, NZ is under-represented.

It's taken a while but the three NZ teams are no longer a complete embarrassment, so perhaps the time is right to consider expansion candidates?

League

League seems the most promising due to the strength of domestic talent.

I suggest a Waikato-BOP team rotating their games between Hamilton, Tauranga and Rotorua. There is a strong grassroots following in this region, and between them these three cities have a larger catchment than Wellington or Christchurch (both of which have little grassroots interest in league anyway).

After this all I can see is another Auckland team but this risks eating into the Warriors' support so I'm not in favour.

Football

NZ football doesn't have a particularly illustrious history in Australia, so I think any proposal would have to be extremely compelling to even warrant consideration.

Wellington has proved to be a great football base with a cosmopolitan population who are receptive to the global game.

Auckland has looked promising but has a dismal track record, and success there would take careful analysis and organisation. South Auckland is league territory and the North Shore is Saffer rugby land despite the fabulous (and usually empty) facility of North Shore Stadium. The CBD and Eastern Suburbs have the closest thing to a Wellington demographic, but the most suitable stadium would be Eden Park and this appears to be closed to football (provision for a team should be a precondition for Rugby World Cup upgrade funding!) Waitakere have strong domestic football representation but no facilities.

My opinion is that football in Christchurch stands in the shadow of the mighty Canterbury/Crusaders and the population is far too provincial to be interested. Bahrain, Al-Ahly and TP Mazembe would probably be at risk of a beating if they were seen out on a Friday night!

Hawkes Bay and Manawatu are consistently strong domestically but their populations just aren't big enough to compete with Australian franchises. If they were a hundred kms closer together then we might have something...

Edit: With any luck the success of Auckland City at the World Club Champs may be the spur for a franchise there. Also I only just noticed that the population of Townsville (home of North Queensland Fury) is on a par with Napier, so perhaps this would be a viable franchise after all. However you'd expect that other centres would be ahead in the queue from the A-League's perspective.

Basketball

The Breakers haven't been around long but seem to have hit such a level of consistency that expansion is an unexpectedly realistic possibility.

Unfortunately I'm so ignorant about NZ basketball that I have no idea which cities or regions would be first off the rank. All I know is that Auckland is covered already, basketball is a winter sport which means it's vulnerable to the popularity of other winter codes, and previously we had a thriving domestic competition that has certainly dropped off my radar when the Breakers were launched and all the focus turned onto them.

Any suggestions?

Jack Bauer and sly media in-jokes?

TVNZ: "Nelson cyclist Jack Bauer continued to cling on to the Tour of Southland's yellow jersey after a fighting finish in Thursday's 134km sixth stage. Bauer, 24, dragged himself up the gruelling climb on the Crown Range near Queenstown to retain the overall ..."

3 News: 24 hours on and Jack Bauer has tightened his grip on the leader's jersey in the Tour of Southland. Bauer holds a 25 second lead over Bissell's Peter Latham, with Jeremy Vennell another two seconds back, after a tough hill climb near ...

You be the judge.

This has been a looooong time coming

Lynx is less a deodorant than the last resort of the testosteronally desperate and delusional. So the news that some reeking lonely guy is suing Unilever for misrepresentation of trade comes as no surprise at all. By rights they should have to repay every cent.

Why aren't the cops profiling Lynx users to identify when horniness becomes stalkiness?