Oracle getting 'spanked'....

Oracle's daily view... The back end of NZ...

Thanks to a tactical move that backfired in Tuesday's early race, Oracle Team USA is in such disarray that it used its "postponement card" to scrub the later race.  When that race takes place Thursday, it's entirely possible that tactician John Kostecki may not be on the boat.

"I can't guarantee anything," skipper Jimmy Spithill said. "I probably can't guarantee I'll be on there."
For the first time in America's Cup history, each team in this year's regatta is allowed one postponement per series - no strings attached, no explanations needed.

To the average American sports fan, it's a little like a team trailing 35-7 at halftime of the Super Bowl but announcing, "Let's knock off until Tuesday." Or imagine a manager who doesn't like the next pitching matchup with his team down 3-0 in the World Series. If the sailing rule applied, he could wait a day or two until Big Lefty was rested enough to pitch.

Suffice it to say Oracle is in deep trouble. It is down 4-to-minus-1 and needs 10 more points to retain the Cup. Emirates Team New Zealand needs just five to wrench it from Oracle's grasp.
Oracle was leading the Kiwis until Kostecki called for a tack on top of a turn around the leeward mark. Had the boat taken a normal turn and waited for its first normal tack on the upwind leg, it probably would have maintained the lead.

Instead, a poorly executed tack slowed the boat to a crawl, and the gleeful Kiwis took command on their first starboard tack of the leg. They led by a whopping 1,500 meters on the downwind fourth leg and won the five-leg race by 1 minute, 17 seconds.

"It was a mistake," strategist-grinder Tom Slingsby said. "We wanted to cover the right-hand side" of the course toward Alcatraz. "Ideally, we probably should have kept going straight and tacked when they tacked." If Kostecki, a Bay Area native, is replaced, Slingsby and Ben Ainslie - who skippered Oracle's other boat during in-house racing - would be candidates to replace him.

Spithill sidestepped a question on whether Kostecki might be benched. "Right now we're focusing on ways to make the boat go faster," he said. Invoking a phrase from football, he said the team couldn't decide "until we've seen the video." He made no apologies for using the postponement card. "The boat was fine," he said. "We feel like we need to regroup. ... It's obvious we've got to make some changes."

The team is not about to use a lay day Wednesday to "massage each other's egos," he said. If Oracle did not scrub the race and make changes, he said, "there was a real chance we weren't going to win the second race of the day."

After making the postponement call - in collaboration with his crew, he said - Spithill jumped onto a support boat and immediately had an intense discussion with chief executive Russell Coutts, who evidently was not in on the decision. Asked the gist of the conversation, Spithill said, mischievously, "We were just talking rugby." Does he feel secure in his own job? He pulled out a well-worn Australian expression: "You can be a rooster one day and a feather duster the next, mate."

He vowed that the competition isn't over. "This doesn't worry us. The team's not flustered."
His bravado recalled Marine Gen. Chesty Puller's famous reaction to being told his troops were surrounded: "Great. Now we can shoot at those bastards from any direction."

Oracle was further plagued by using a heavier foresail than the Kiwis. It slowed the boat on the upwind leg, Spithill acknowledged.

At the start, Kiwis skipper Dean Barker got inside position on Spithill, but Oracle was faster to the first mark by inflicting disturbed air on the Kiwis. Oracle appeared well on its way to its second victory of the series. Then things went awry at the other end of the racecourse