A leading question

PLUS: A huuuuge weekend at Mt Smart, and in Nottingham, and in Albany and Hamilton; while it was a big week at Sport Review (but not so much in Manchester)

One-eyed Cantabrian. Getty Images

Let’s take a moment to let The Bounce shamelessly plunder itself for a lead item.

When assessing the magnificence of Ardie Savea’s performance for Moana Pasifika this season, The Bounce referenced a 1news.co.nz story that highlighted whether it would influence decisions around the All Black captaincy. In particular, whether it should shift from Scott Barrett, who has looked far from a natural in the role, to Savea.

It sparked questions as to whether captaincy in rugby even matters, especially in a team like the All Blacks where you have leaders across the park.

I would have been inclined to say no, particularly when you compare it to the captaincy demands in cricket, when a decision to move gully two paces squarer can start a butterfly effect that changes entire careers.

Working with Sam Whitelock on his book, however, changed my mind. I was genuinely surprised at how much the captaincy meant to him at the Crusaders and how hurt he was to have missed out on the role in Ian Foster’s All Blacks. It became very clear that captaincy was more than deciding whether to play with or against the wind in the first half and pointing at the sticks when you were opting to “take the three”.

It is not difficult to imagine that Savea feels the same way as Whitelock; that he takes great pride in captaining at the levels below test rugby, has enjoyed his fill-in stints as All Black skipper and desperately wishes that Scott Robertson had handed him the mantle rather than Barrett.

It is not too late to change, obviously, but unless New Zealand Rugby have thrown a curve ball worthy of peak Sandy Koufax, it’s not happening any time soon.

The first All Blacks squad of the season will be named on June 23, which is not in the least bit interesting. Where it is named from is:

Coastal Rugby Club, 54 Rahotu Road, Rahotu, Taranaki.

That would be the same Coastal Rugby Club all the Barrett boys grew up at, whose Rahotu clubrooms sit just a few kilometres south of their Pungarehu dairy farm. You can imagine how well it would go down among the gathered cockies if Robertson took the opportunity to appoint a new captain.

As an aside, the story of the Coastal club is the story of modern New Zealand club rugby, particularly in rural areas. From their website.

Throughout the 70s and 80s rugby on the Coast was strong. The Coast was thriving.

Farms were smaller and labour intensive, and there were four dairy factories between Okato and Opunake. This meant there was a ready supply of players and Opunake and Okato were competitive in the senior division (Okato winning the McMasters shield in 1975 and 1977) and Rahotu were top of the second division.

The late-80s saw some changes. Factories closed, farms got bigger and employed less workers and the working week extended into Saturday. The proud clubs battled on but all three struggled for both numbers and meaningful results. While this was no doubt painful for the loyal spectators the players felt it more. There was whispered talk among senior players of doing the unthinkable and joining forces with the old foes. At the time, especially within the older generation, the very notion was blasphemous. Generations had battled on the field and parochialism remained strong... Such was the feeling that any meaningful discussion had to be cloak and dagger. A clandestine meeting between senior players at Smiley Barrett’s place confirmed the players commitment to join forces.

***

Bit of a continuing Taradise theme to this but it turns out not all heroes wear capes. Some wear Red Bands and swear a lot. Out of the phone booth emerges dairy farmer/ rugby coach Neil Barnes, in conversation with Sport Nation’s Ian Smith, getting to the nub of the biggest impediment to New Zealand’s ongoing rugby success: the ‘corruption’ of schoolboy rugby.

What follows is a largely verbatim quote, though it has been ever-so-slightly edited for grammatical clarity.

“I love the passion schools have for their rugby but it has got out of hand. Schools should not be measured by the worth of their rugby team, they should be measured by how they progress their students academically and as people.

“At the moment, when you have people employed to run rugby programmes, all they give a shit about is how successful their team is. So they plunder players from all the other schools to bring to their school. It doesn’t mean they’re doing a great job, but if you have the best players you will get good results.

“You have to understand the effect it has on the schools you have plundered these players from. Now they have less kids and can’t put teams together in the right grades. If you centralise everything, yes, some of those schools celebrate how good they are at rugby, but you have to look at the knock-on effect and what you’re doing to a lot of the other kids in schools around the place.

“For me, schools should concentrate on what they’re bloody good at and allow the clubs to come in and help with the rugby side of it and show the kids a good time in rugby.”

I have emphasised the above sentence because it reminds me of a conversation I had with a principal of a mid-sized co-ed school some years ago. He had just seen his best player leave on a scholarship to an elite school on the other side of town. While he said he had no grudge against the boy or their parents, who had been sold the dream of upward mobility, he matter-of-factly explained the downstream effects.

It went something like this: the boy’s best mate on the team quit almost immediately. The teams fortunes dipped significantly and by season’s end a couple of the older boys had effectively disengaged from rugby. At least one Year 12 also stopped playing after the season and another was looking to change schools.

While some of that attrition might have happened anyway, it is not going too far to say that one school’s quest for marginal improvement both imploded a smaller school’s programme and prevented any chance of two or three players leaving school and continuing to play the game at club level.

But as long as your own school looks great playing on the telly, who cares, right?