FIGHT! NZR, RA and revenge served cold
PLUS: A bumper The Week That Was and the Weekend That Will Be
Rod McGeoch, known as Mr Olympics due to leading the successful bid to bring the Games to Sydney, described the political sensibilities of that city, including the politics of sport, as “like living in the Balkans”.
New Zealand Rugby is discovering that after Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan used the week of the all-New Zealand Super Rugby final to announce they were considering going alone after the 2023 competition.
For two years RA have been harbouring a grudge after NZR unilaterally decided to take over Super Rugby and “invite” two Australian franchises to enter. While that never panned out, the slight has never been forgotten. In the corridors of RA, the name Brent Impey invokes the same sort of affection as Attila the Hun’s did in the Roman Senate.
That grudge had no tangible way of manifesting itself while rugby was at such a low ebb in the country, a distant fourth in the football codes popularity war behind the AFL, NRL and football.
But a bit has happened since then. For a start, they’ve been awarded the 2027 Rugby World Cup hosting rights, the ultimate tool to leverage interest in a struggling sport.
Secondly, they’ve watched NZR painstakingly stitch together a deal with US private equity giants Silver Lake, a deal they believed should have been with Sanzaar, not individual unions. They know the numbers involved and can essentially take them to market.
How much are Luxembourg-based CVC prepared to pay to bolster a rugby portfolio that includes the biggest Northern Hemisphere tournaments? Rugby Australia will be keen to hear.
While most judges believe McLennan is posturing, there is a proven market for tribalism in Australian sport. Can rugby manufacture that sort of fervour?
It might be that McLennan’s end goal is for Australia to take a larger slice of the broadcasting pie - in the broadest terms, New Zealand has a very good deal with Sky, who were negotiating with the threat of Spark Sport hovering over them, while Australia has a very bad deal, negotiated while they were in dire straits - and at the very least an equal ownership and say in the future of Super Rugby Pacific.
This is just a very Balkan way of going about it.
If you want to dig a little deeper into how NZR and RA found themselves in this fraught situation, the one and only Scotty Stevenson and I wrote this piece about the decaying state of the transtasman rugby relationship for The Spinoff last year.
While some of the specific arguments have been resolved the “whole vibe of the thing” still stands.
Speaking of transtasman rugby, no competition makes finding basic information harder than Super Rugby.
Like any good sports tragic, I went to the Super Rugby Final match page on the official website to conduct a forensic study of each player’s season stats. I found this.
Very helpful.
THE WEEK THAT WAS
Stuff reports that World Rugby is going to extend the stand-down period for professional players who suffer an obvious concussion to 12 days. It’d be wrong to knock any move to improve player welfare, but if the overriding concern is long-term cognitive damage (including but not limited to CTE), then we’re still missing the point.
The danger is volume, and it’s not volume of “obvious concussions” because that’s the easiest thing to recognise and mitigate against. It’s the volume of rugby, which leads to the volume of subconcussive hits, which leads to the incremental damage to the chemical make-up of the brain matter.
The idea that a clearly concussed person can be cleared to play again in a week is grotesque and ending that farce is a good thing, but there’s so much more to do starting with reducing the amount of games professionals play in a year, and putting strict no-contact rules into trainings.
On a loosely related theme, I was searching for some Phil Bennett footage when I came across this highlights clip of the famous All Blacks v Barbarians match of 1973. Yes, it’s a great try but my word, the three two things that stood out for me were:
The dreadful haka, lowlighted by Alex Wyllie clapping along like it was a campfire rendition of John Denver’s “Country Roads”, and;
Ron Urlich and Bryan Williams’ horrendous coat-hanger tackles on JPR Williams, who was a magnet for New Zealand thuggery in the 1970s, and;
The two one-handed passes before the try was scored - Tom David’s to Derek Quinell was genius, while Quinell’s to Gareth Edwards was a metre forward.
Former England wing Ugo Monye says rugby still has to address its drinking culture and laddish reputation if it wants to be an attractive option for parents looking to put their kids into sport.
Taken from an interview with the Telegraph, Monye said:
“There has always been a heavy drinking culture within rugby. I invested heavily into that as well during my playing days, and I enjoyed it. But if I was in Birmingham, in a densely populated Muslim community, and my teenage kids wanted to play rugby, as a parent, my perception of rugby would be: ‘All they do is drink after every match - I don’t want my children to be a part of that’.”
Yeah, it still stings a little, but hey, revel for a while in the knowledge that the way England are approaching their cricket now has become known as… Baz-ball.
Stokes had a wonderful game with bat and ball, and also with words. He got to the nub of what Baz-ball may be with a wonderful turn of phrase that ad copywriters for sports brands are kicking themselves for not having coined first. “Run into the fear,” he said.
With the US Open on in Boston this weekend, the august New York Times went big on op-eding golf. No surprises that it wasn’t actually the US Open in the centre of the room, but LIV Golf.
Paul Krugman (metered $) writes that we don’t live so much in a cancel culture as we do a sell-out culture. That is to say, we’ll do anything and promote anything no matter how heinous if we’re paid enough: “Kids used to look up to public figures, sports stars in particular, as role models. Do they still? Can they, given what public figures will do if the [cheques] are big enough?”
Elsewhere in the same pages, Peter Coy ponders whether restraint of trade, as being practiced by the PGA Tour on the defectors to LIV, can ever be a good thing. It’s a bit dry, but I did chuckle at the punchline of the intro.
“Neither antagonist in the fight over golf’s newest league arouses much sympathy. On one side there’s LIV Golf, which is lavishly financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, a nation with an execrable record on human rights. On the other there’s the PGA Tour, which is fighting hard to keep its golfers from earning bigger paychecks with LIV Golf, suspending 17 of them for taking part in the LIV Golf Invitational Series. It’s tempting to wish a plague on both their clubhouses.”
One of my favourite interviews ($) in my last year at the Herald was with young Russian-born Kiwi boxer Andrei Mikhailovich. Sample quote:
“I was a shithead and I got into a lot of trouble with drinking and drugs, shit like that in my spare time. I was like 11, 12, I was a baby man. I would go to the alcohol cabinet, grab a bottle, open it, drink that, get tipsy, like the feeling, keep doing it, fill the bottle before my parents came home. I smoked Kronic, weed, but drinking was my biggest problem because it was so easy to get. A lot of it was curiosity, boredom, bad influences. From 11 to 14 I had no drive, no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Bored. That’s when I found boxing and found a drive because I thought boxing was the best thing since Jesus Christ.”
He’s come a long way. Unbeaten at 18-0, the middleweight is going to go even further if his performance this week in Australia is any gauge.
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
It’s the Super Rugby final this weekend.
I mention that only because you could be forgiven for thinking it’s actually All Blacks team-naming week and the match is incidental to the main event.
It beggars belief that New Zealand Rugby has not found a way around this issue of self-sabotaging Sanzaar’s showpiece match with the All Blacks’ announcement.
In a week we should be talking about Beauden Barrett v Richie Mo’unga, Akira Ioane v Pablo Matera, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck v David Havili and, of course, Razor Roberston v Leon MacDonald, we’re instead asking whether Ian Foster really thinks TJ Perenara is the fifth-best halfback in the country.
There are logistical reasons for naming the All Blacks squad this week.
The All Blacks management and wider New Zealand Rugby machinery need to know who is in the team so they can outfit them, work out nationality status as some players may not have a New Zealand passport, book travel and perform fitness assessments before assembly.
Once All Blacks management starts doing some of those administrative functions, news travels very fast and there would be no need for an official team naming at all, so the timing moved some years ago to be the week before the final, regardless of whether New Zealand teams were playing.
The implication is not that Foster, or Steve Hansen before him, is necessarily jealous of the attention Robertson, who is leading the Crusaders to their sixth final in six years, but that New Zealand Rugby should surely by now have found a solution that enables them to get the hell out of the way of the Super Rugby final.
It plays into the narrative that Super Rugby’s sole purpose is as an extended All Blacks trial. How can the public embrace a competition that has no stage of its own.
This is the most highly anticipated Super Rugby final in years, as evidenced by the “Full House” sign that will be posted outside Eden Park. It pits a ruthlessly functional and efficient behemoth versus a dynamic challenger playing with confidence and clarity, both led by innovative and ambitious coaches.
This is all rugby fans should be concerning themselves with this week; not how underwhelming the midfield choices for the All Blacks look.
Blues v Crusaders, Eden Park, tomorrow 7.05pm, Sky Sport 1
Rory McIlroy has been the most outspoken opponent of LIV Golf. For that reason alone, it’d be nice to see him triumph at Brookline.
US Open, Boston, rounds 2-4, tomorrow-Monday (times vary), Sky Sport 6
The Black Ferns look to wrap up their Pacific Four series with a win against the USA.
NZ v USA, Whangarei, Saturday 4pm, Spark Sport
Other bits and pieces I might try to catch a little of include the Canadian GP (Spark), Shane van Gisbergen and the Supercars from Darwin (Sky), and the Stanley Cup finals between the Colorado Avalanche and the two-time defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning (ESPN). Check your guides for listings.
I’ve told myself I’m having a week off the Warriors before their big homecoming, but you know what I’ll probably watch a replay. It’s “only” the Panthers - they’ll be fine.
There's a reason for that bad 1973 haka, to be fair. The All Blacks hadn't actually performed it at all on the tour, because management had decided against it. But the Welsh RU specifically requested it for before the BaaBaa's game, but manager Ernie Todd (who had sent Keith Murdoch home earlier in the tour) didn't tell them until the morning of the game. That's why they'e all looking at Sid Going and trying in vain to copy him, because he was the only one that knew it and they hadn't had time to even practice.