The GOAT clears his throat
PLUS: Eliza McCartney vaults into The Week That Was and a foulmouthed Weekend That Will Be
Yes, Richie McCaw’s playing legacy was impressive but not germane to the topic, which is the governance of the national sport, but as a member of two of the most powerful rugby boards in the country - albeit ones who are deliberately trying to depower provincial union influence - it was absolutely right that he should speak about the current New Zealand Rugby imbroglio.
These were his most pertinent points:
“[This] is the bit people have to remember – all the feedback from everyone is put into this [Pilkington Report] and they have come back with their findings. It may not 100 per cent suit your little patch [and] you can have a debate whether they are 100 percent right, but we all agreed they were the people in the right spot to make that call.
“This is not professional players versus the provincial unions [PUs], it is a bunch of experts who came up with something and we want to see that implemented for the best of the game.”
The PUs have nobody they can throw in front of the public with the mana and connection to the contemporary game, so it feels like an unfair PR fight, but to that the old peacenik McCaw would say: “Why are we even fighting at all?”
I mentioned in Wednesday’s special edition of The Bounce that I was struggling to piece together fully formed thoughts because of the complexity of the moving parts. In terms of writing a considered and coherent opinion piece, that’s still the case.
I do have a number of disordered thoughts, however, and I’m going to use the journalism equivalent of a cheat code, the bullet-point system, to make them.
The Players’ Association is not the first entity to threaten drastic action over the non-implementation of the Pilkington Report. Dame Patsy Reddy, the New Zealand Rugby chairwoman, did the same thing, it just didn’t capture the attention quite so vividly.
That plays into McCaw’s (slightly disingenuous) line that this is not a Players v PUs thing. The Super Rugby franchises want the reforms implemented, the majority of the NZR board and executive want it, Silver Lake (dressed up as NZRC) wants it. Ian Kirkpatrick wants it. Even some of the PUs want it, with Taranaki particularly strident about the need to reject Proposal 2, which was tabled for vote at the Special General Meeting next week. It is understood that Waikato, Counties and Bay of Plenty are all backers of Proposal 1, the (nearly) full implementation of the Pilkington Report’s recommendations.
So why are the players the flashpoint for the “conflict”? Because unlike the other supporters of Proposal 1, they are the only entity that has any leverage, aka the Collective Agreement. My guess is they would have risked even more public opprobrium if they had sat back, let the PUs vote for Proposal 2 without making their position clear, only to detonate five months down the track when the Collective renegotiations began.
Regardless of when they made their move, aren’t they still subverting democracy? This is a point former NZR CEO David Moffett made when I spoke to him last night. He said he would urge the PUs to stand up to the players by calling an Extraordinary General Meeting to sack the board, if only to preserve this treasured concept.
To which, as an advocate of the devil, you might reply: Is the NZR really a democracy? It’s a funny looking one if it is, considering for example, that Buller has more voting rights than the Crusaders.
Ownership of the game is always a vexed issue, which Ric Salizzo highlighted nicely with this post.
On that subject, we are long overdue for hard, potentially combustible, discussions about what the role of the PUs really is.
As one who has operated on a provincial board said (under the protection of anonymity), the PUs should be more worried about the make-up of their own boards than that of NZR. They’re “owned” by the clubs, the source said, but too many PU “boards are made up of men who want to [spend] their cash on the performance of the NPC team”.
The source continued: “It’s not the NZR’s job to get kids playing rugby in Stratford; that’s Taranaki’s job.” Which brings to mind David Gibson and North Harbour. There was a guy, I thought, who recognised the demographic challenges rugby faced and had to work harder and more innovatively to engage the population in rugby. The community responded well, the traditionalists didn’t.
Gibson is now doing something else.
New Zealand has, in effect, 20 professional high-performance units (and that’s not including the elite schools that serve as proxy academies). Most of those units run academies and offer services that are replicated, sometimes within the same city. This is not what efficiency or effectiveness looks like.
Board reform is SO boring. Many believe, with some justification, that the issue of sports governance is massively overplayed. I don’t agree with that take, but understand where it’s coming from. But to illustrate the importance of good governance, I’ll call upon a gratuitously bold-typed question: How can the sort of board that desperately needed a nine-figure private equity capital injection then be trusted to use it wisely?
I feel like a sadist in saying this, but what the hell, it’s my newsletter: I would like to see the PUs vote for Proposal 2. Not because I want them to shove it up the players, not because I think there’s anything particularly edifying about the stoush and not because it gives me more fodder (although the latter is true), but because I’m genuinely curious to see what a split would look like and what changes it would usher in. The game will come back together in some form, but sometimes it takes massive disruption to shed complacency.
I might ask for a mulligan on the above point.
Please, if anybody in the decision-making desks at Sky TV is watching this, can we get cameras inside the SGM and broadcast it live? It’ll be a niche audience, but a highly engaged one.