Super Rugby looked a gift horse in the mouth

PLUS: RTS and the fullback debate that isn't, drugs in the AFL, and how athletes are speeding up the decline of sports journalism

Notice anything missing in the background? Getty Images

Who is running Super Rugby?

The question is not even whose nameplate is above the door, but who is making the big decisions? Who is sitting there with a calendar on one side of the desk, a big blank piece of paper on the other and comes up with a schedule like the one thrust upon us over the weekend?

Look at the smorgasbord of big-time sports you had to choose from over a long weekend.

Granted, not everything on this list is going to move everybody’s needle, but regardless of personal preferences, here’s some top-of-the-head stuff you could have chosen:

• A full round of Super Rugby;

• Ditto for the NRL;

• Ditto for the AFL;

• A critical weekend in the Premier League;

• A big weekend in the A-League;

• So much basketball - NBL, March Madness, NBA;

• The White Ferns versus England;

• Opening weekend in MLB;

• Kiwis playing golf in lots of different places;

• SvG in the Xfinity series.

Not just any long weekend either, but one where you’re held virtual hostage by the TV due to the country shutting down on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

You have that incredible opportunity to harvest eyeballs and yet somebody working for the husk of what used to be Sanzaar comes up with a plan that has the last New Zealand interest in the competition ending on Saturday evening.

Not Easter Monday.

Not even Easter Sunday.

But Saturday night.

Just hire a small plane and fly over Mt Smart Stadium on Sunday with a banner saying: “WE’VE GIVEN UP - ALL YOURS, NRL.”

The whole thing is baffling. Sanzaar happily appropriated an NRL idea by flying every Super Rugby team to Melbourne for a weekend of games the locals had little to no interest in, yet a really simple idea like spreading your content more effectively over the longest weekend of the ‘winter’ sports season¹ goes into the too-hard basket?

Again, who’s actually running the Super Rugby show?

The Bounce is proud to introduce K3 Legal as a partner for the Monday Mash-up for 2024. Click on the link to learn more about their legal services.

---

Meanwhile, in the absence of compelling content, rugby just finds itself in an endless spin cycle of negative headlines.

On the tedious yet vital governance standoff:

New Zealand Rugby chair Dame Patsy Reddy has threatened to resign as tensions reach boiling point over the seven-month governance standoff with the provincial unions…

Reddy, NZ Rugby’s first female chair, said she would not support alternative reform proposals that compromised the quest to usher through the non-binding Pilkington report recommendations. Those stated NZ Rugby’s constitution and governance was not fit for purpose and stressed the need for a nine-person independent board.

Reddy, not for the first time, told the provincial unions that if they continue to push alternative proposals that seek to maintain at least three New Zealand Rugby board members with at least two years’ experience on a provincial board, she could not support it and would, therefore, resign from her post.

On the possibility of the NPC not having a broadcast partner, which apparently was news to Sky, its broadcast partner ($):

It is not going to disappear entirely from screens despite the fact New Zealand Rugby wrote to the provincial unions last week and told them: “That future broadcast revenue values for the NPC will be significantly lower than previous broadcast agreements, on the basis that Sky TV is not expected to wish to bid for rights to broadcast every NPC/FPC [Farah Palmer Cup] game moving forward.”

There were… things about that statement that were alarming — perhaps illustrative of the concerns growing within the rugby community about the competencies in the national body’s management and executive group.

The first is that [it is] manifestly not true — which is why this week, NZR re-sent its correspondence to the unions with that specific line deleted.

Tana Umaga on Super Rugby’s fitness, after a miserable crowd turned out to watch the Blues play Moana Pasifika in what should have been a vibrant local derby but was anything but:

“We have got to think about the product we are putting out. We want people to come to the games because as we’ve seen, those numbers aren’t as good as they used to be in the old days.”

Even rugby lifer Phil Gifford has genuine fears for the sport’s future ($):

Naturally, scrapping over American private equity firm Silver Lake buying a slice of rugby here, or the chaos that accompanied the appointment of Scott Robertson as All Blacks coach before Ian Foster took the side to the World Cup, or the current Mexican stand-off over who runs the board, captures the headlines.

But I’ve been more spooked by the fact some of our greatest players and coaches have, both in public and privately, said how watching the game they grew up with is no longer their first priority. If people who have loved the game all their lives are struggling to engage, how can we expect the average fan to be riveted?

There is, of course, an element of self-fulfilment here. The reason why rugby attracts so many negative headlines is because there is still a great deal of care for the sport in New Zealand. It is the only ‘round’ that has reporters all to itself and although it might at times see that as a curse rather than a blessing, other sports in New Zealand would sell their souls for the amount of coverage rugby gets.

While it might make NZR CEO Mark Robinson gag on his Weet-Bix, the fact the sport gets headlines at all puts him in a privileged position.

Still, rugby below test level has never looked so bleak.

***

It’s a very small anecdote, but one that nevertheless says something.

I woke up on Sunday morning, checked out the weather app on the phone and thought, “Yeah, it will be a nice evening for the Warriors.” Went online to try to get tickets for my daughter and I. Not a chance.

It seems only a matter of time before the NRL puts a second New Zealand team in the comp. Super Rugby is going to have to work a lot, lot harder for hearts and minds.

***

It feels like this is part of the problem, but look how long it has taken me to get around to mentioning that the Friday night game, won 37-26 by the low-flying Crusaders over the high-flying Chiefs, was actually really good, and featured a cracking try to hooker George Bell.

---

The Warriors 20-12 win over the Knights in a re-run of last year’s home playoff by contrast wasn’t an amazing game, but it looked like a hell of an occasion, and often that is more important.

Getty Images

By my unscientific estimation, Andrew Webster still has them running at around 70 percent capability on offence. We haven’t even got to the razzle yet, let alone the dazzle, so there is much more to come.

It would be nice for those with heart issues if the Warriors could become a little more efficient at closing out games they dominate.

The big news from the game was Roger Tuivasa-Sheck’s return to fullback, where he played well, but possibly not well enough to keep Webster awake at night when Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad comes back.

“Talking to Roger, it felt like he learned plenty tonight,” Webster said. “He feels the NRL is a different beast from when he left it. He hasn’t had a lot of reps at fullback – we’ve been concentrating on centre – so I was proud of him.

“Everyone thinks fullback’s about highlights plays. It’s about where you put yourself defensively. It’s how thick you make the defensive line look. Fullback play has come a long way.”

It might have come a long way, but could Webster make it sound any more prosaic?

---

Here’s another couple of non-rugby headlines that caught my attention over the past week:

“AFL admits players who have illicit drugs in their system have been pulled from games:”

This has been massive news in Australia and it’s hard to work out if the AFL and its’ players’ association have been massively progressive and forward-thinking, or massively irresponsible.

This is hopelessly simplifying it, but essentially the AFL has been running an off-the-books recreational drugs-testing programme alongside its on-the-books performance-enhancing one.

This allows them to pull players from matches under the guise of injuries and attempt to assist them kick their habit or make better decisions out of the glare of publicity. In many respects it is admirable, BUT… critics argue that the leniency given has created a rampant recreational drugs culture in the sport.

In other words, it’s easier to make terrible decisions if there are no up-front ramifications for them.

***

Can sports journalism survive in the era of the athlete?

This is a US-centric view of the decline and seemingly inevitable fall of sports journalism, but it is not difficult to see echoes here, especially when newsrooms are shrinking and in some cases closing. 

Radio Sport - anyone remember that?

In recent years, shows… hosted by athletes, some retired, many not—seem to be everywhere. Tom Brady has the Let’s Go! podcast, now in its third year. The brothers Jason and Travis Kelce, both (until Jason retired this month) active NFL players, host New Heights, where they discuss everything from their most recent games to Travis’s burgeoning relationship with Taylor Swift… There’s Podcast P, with Paul George; On Base, with Mookie Betts; I Am Athlete, with Brandon Marshall; Green Light with Chris Long; Bussin’ with the Boys, with Will Compton—the list goes on.

The shows are usually simply produced. Their appeal lies in offering fans the sense of being welcomed into the private spaces where athletes talk among themselves—an amiable environment of private stories and inside jokes—without adding in too many unwanted topics or uncomfortable questions. When the basketball star Nikola Jokić, who almost never grants interviews, recently appeared on Curious Mike, a video podcast hosted by his teammate Michael Porter Jr, he praised the host for asking “the best questions since I came to the NBA”.

All the fun has drawn in huge audiences—and, inevitably, lots of money… The biggest of them all, The Pat McAfee Show, hosted by the former NFL punter, was licensed last year by ESPN, at a reported $85 million valuation…

By some metrics, sports, and the people who play them, have never been more popular - 96 of the top 100 broadcasts in the US last year were NFL games, according to Sportico. Yet in the world of sports journalism, things have never been so bleak.

In the past year alone, HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, a Peabody- and duPont-winning investigative show, came to an end; and Outside the Lines, ESPN’s beloved deep-dive, was cancelled as a standalone show… The sequence was similar, if less comprehensive, on the print side: Sports Illustrated, the magazine that broke the story of baseball players using performance-enhancing drugs, turned into an AI-generated clickbait farm, before laying off nearly all of its staff; Deadspin was gutted; and the New York Times, which led the coverage into what the NFL knew about the link between concussions and brain damage, disbanded its in-house sports section.

This doom-saying is not new. On September 6, 2021, a man not far from here, wrote this as part of his introductory essay to The Bounce:

I seriously started thinking about a separation from the job I loved about five years ago. It wasn’t the pace of change that was frightening so much as the pace of disintegration. For the past 10 years New Zealand sports journalism, and I’m talking more about publishing as opposed to the broadcast genre, has been hollowed out to a point where it is barely recognisable as the industry I joined full of misplaced self-importance in 1996.

To the reader it might look much the same: there are headlines, photos and words, some put together better than others, but the process of news gathering has all but disappeared. Sports reporters have instead become clearinghouses for scraps of information disseminated through media releases, press conferences, the dreaded media scrum and, increasingly, social media posts.

Since I wrote that, you can add the hollowing out of broadcast news media to the mix, perhaps even more so than publishing.

A quick note

Thanks for indulging me in a small break post the men’s international cricket season. From next week I will be moving back to the traditional three-newsletters-per-week output unless otherwise stated.

There is a bit going on that I do want to dive a bit deeper into in the coming weeks, including the battle for power in rugby. If most of what I’m hearing behind the scenes is true, the self interest of some provincial “rugby folk” is staggering.

I do maintain, however, that the biggest weakness of the Pilkington Report was the nebulous Stakeholder Council, that NZR has redrafted as a Rugby Council. Either way, it is a recipe for disaster, basically ushering in a dual-board era - and what I mean when I say era, is error.

I’m showing my age here, but this flow chart proudly produced by NZR would have worked brilliantly as a prop in Yes, Minister.

That’s quite something. Just to check, we’re trying to modernise rugby’s governance, aren’t we?

1. If the Easter weekend was underwhelming on the Super Rugby front, look out next weekend, when it is barnstormer after barnstormer after…

Friday: Blues v Force; Rebels v Drua. Saturday: Chiefs v Moana Pasifika; Brumbies v Waratahs…

Holy heck!