Rise up! Rugby takes a giant leap forward
PLUS: Exciting Substack news, a story you should all read, The BYC and Clarke Gayford's shameless role in the All Black debacle.
For a while there I didn’t think we were going to get to this point, but it really does look like Super Rugby Aupiki will finally kick off tonight, with Chiefs Manawa playing Matatu in Hamilton.
To understand why Super Rugby Aupiki is important from a purely high-performance perspective, and why it is being rushed into production this year despite the significant public health hurdles that in other circumstances would have seen its start pushed back even further, draw a crooked line that starts in Exeter, England, and ends in Castres in the foothills of the French Pyrenees.
Along this path the 2021 Black Ferns travelled, the first time they’d ventured anywhere for two years as the logistical and financial restrictions of Covid-19 bit.
What they found was eye opening.
England toyed with them. France battered them.
Four tests played, four lost. Forty-seven points scored, 166 conceded. If it was just an arithmetics exercise it would be frightening enough but that wasn’t even half of it.
France and England were playing a different sport. They were more structured, more set-piece focused, more dynamic. They were fitter and stronger. Even if New Zealand’s players still had a fine-skills advantage, and that was debatable, it was nullified by the big picture.
It frightened those on the field and those in charge. Here was New Zealand, the sport’s great innovators against whom everyone else had for so long benchmarked, playing a seemingly impossible game of catch up.
Frustration boiled over, highlighted by hooker Te Kura Ngata-Aerengamate’s Instagram post when she detailed her mental breakdown in part because she says she was made to feel worthless by coach Glenn Moore. On the other side, there are many angry that Moore, who has worked for so long with so little resources, was unfairly maligned for doing what he has done all his life: coach hard.
No matter where your sympathies lay, it was clear the tour was a hot mess and that the New Zealand women’s game, through circumstances and neglect, was clinging on to a branch halfway down the cliff face. With a World Cup on these shores in the not-too-distant future, the preference is for a top-down rescue rather than the ambulance at the bottom.
That’s not the whole story behind Super Rugby Aupiki, obviously. It was conceived and announced before the aforementioned tour. In many respects, the high-performance aspect is not even the most important part of the equation, but it’s the reason I’ll be watching tonight.
To get a more holistic sense of why this is such an important juncture in not just women’s rugby but the sport as a whole, watch and read Stuff’s “State of the Union” series, which includes this anecdote about just how precarious women’s rugby was even a decade ago.
“Little more than 10 years ago, women’s rugby was nearly wiped out with the stroke of a pen. In 2010 – a World Cup year – NZ Rugby bosses of the day axed the women’s provincial competition as part of cost-cutting measures. “Budget constraints,” the administrators shrugged when the players challenged them on what message it sent to women about the value of their place in the game.”
Super Rugby Aupiki marks the long-overdue entry of a professional women’s rugby competition here, and even in its truncated and some would say unsatisfactory Covid-tailored format, it will be instructive on multiple fronts.
What is the depth like behind the familiar names?
What will the overall quality be like?
What sort of coverage will the tournament get?
What sort of interest will it generate?
The general view is that this is not the start everybody dreamed of - but it is a start.
Chiefs Manawa v Matatu, FMG Stadium, tonight, 7.05pm.
This is why I wondered if SRA would ever get going. Another Omicron day, another postponement.
We’ve got an app
I have exciting news to share: You can now read The Bounce in the new Substack app for iPhone.
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
I have to confess that when I saw the headline for this story in The Cricket Monthly - Cricket's mothers have it better now than ever (but not all of them) - I shrugged my shoulders and thought: “I won’t be reading that.”
Don’t be a dick and (nearly) make the same mistake I did. I’m not sure what drew me back to it - probably the striking lead image - but it’s a fascinating journey through the physical, mental, logistical, cultural and political challenges of combining motherhood and elite sport.
It traverses a whole bunch of topics from IVF to menstrual cycles to breastfeeding, same-sex parenthood, hormonal changes, parental leave and much, much more. It’s not dry, health-based literature either - all the stories have a nice, personal touch, whether it’s Lea Tahuhu and Amy Satterthwaite contemplating whether parenthood meant the end of one of their careers, Megan Schutt’s IVF journey or the story of Sarah Elliott and her 2013 Ashes tour to England.
Elliott would use… breaks in that Ashes test to breastfeed or express milk for her nine-month-old son, Sam. Few who shared the dressing room with Elliott - many of whom are still Australia regulars - had any idea what pumping milk entailed. The way she performed her role as a mother, as much as the hundred she scored across the first two days of the test, left an imprint on her juniors. “To come in [to the change room] and see her breastfeeding during a cricket game - I was just amazed, to be honest,” Schutt says. “This lass has just gone out. Scored a century. Is coming in and rather than rehydrating, that is her priority. I just loved that. That moment has always stuck in my brain - as weird as that sounds.”
That was certainly better International Women’s Day reading than the infamous All Blacks tweet. I’m too late to join the pile-on which was at once predictable, over the top and absolutely necessary, but two thoughts struck me:
1. For future reference, this is how you do it.
2. This is almost certainly true.
We at The BYC gathered in our various sound pods yesterday to discuss the impact Shane Warne had on cricket, the duality of his life - the world’s most sophisticated spin bowler in the body of the world’s most unsophisticated suburban bloke - and how he morphed from cricketer to pop-culture icon. Tony Blain writes into the show in his “Fish ’n’ Chips from Whitby” segment and is beautifully understated as he describes playing Warne in five back-to-back tests on his comeback in 1993.
We also talk through the world’s most boring test at Rawalpindi and Paul and Jason Hoyte conspire to bring me down a peg or two in News or Ruse.
It’s also a huge game today for the White Ferns against India in Hamilton. The West Indies’ unexpected two-from-two start has meant there are six sides who have genuine hopes of securing one of four semifinal sports.
The Ferns recently beat India 4-1 in a series, but dropped the last match so this is no banker.
Paul Ford and I will wrap up all the action, including an interview with keeper Katey Martin, in a BYC World Cup special podcast tomorrow.
