The Sky could fall on school rugby
Sports broadcast giant understood to be pondering ending coverage of 1st XV rugby, PLUS: The Week That Was and the Weekend That Will Be.
The immediate future of televised 1st XV rugby is looking increasingly shaky with Sky TV “undecided” about whether they will screen any games this season, with sources saying it is highly unlikely.
The reasons for the indecision is believed to be both cost-related, which is also connected to the Auckland pull out that was announced last year.
The cost of producing 1st XV rugby is thought to be comparable to an NPC game and Sky is looking at various ways to tighten its belt, as are most media companies.
The absence of Auckland schools, with their large and active alumni networks, has unquestionably made the school product less attractive to existing and potential sponsors (and their proximity to outside broadcast outfits makes those games cheaper to produce), which in itself raises awkward questions around the commercial imperatives of school sport, concerns that have been raised in recent years and not just in rugby.
The 1A principals made that decision on the grounds that the 1st XV scene had become overheated, as had been evidenced by accusations of poaching, rule-bending and in one high-profile case, a boycott.
“As educators, we have become increasingly wary of organisations and individuals seeking to treat secondary schools rugby as an extension of the professional game,” Mt Albert Grammar School headmaster Pat Drumm said at the time of the witdrawal. “The 1A schools have taken great strides in recent years in terms of the recruitment of student players, and we see this decision as a natural extension of our responsibility to the sport and to those who play it.”
In effect, schoolboy rugby had become professionalised and while this had some high-performance advantages - elite school programmes were in effect doing much of the talent ID and development heavy lifting that once fell to clubs and provincial unions - it also came with a bunch of damaging unintended consequences.
If Sky withdraws, it won’t mean the end of school rugby on TV, though it will significantly reduce the number of eyeballs that see it.
There will be other sources that schools who wish to continue playing for the cameras can option. Maori TV already has the central North Island’s Super 8 competition and there are various streaming options, though none have the rugby-ready audience that Sky TV provided.
THE WEEK THAT WAS
The announcement this week of Scott Robertson’s All Blacks coaching team came as a surprise to absolutely nobody. It was, after all, pretty much the same coaching team that was deemed not strong enough to take the reins in 2020.
Things can change a lot in a World Cup cycle but in this case they haven’t much. Scott Robertson still looks a more dynamic head-coach option than Ian Foster and his choice of assistants, who apparently didn’t measure up to John Plumtree and Brad Mooar et al three-and-a-bit years ago, still haven’t won Super Rugby titles as head coaches (there is a pretty good reason for that, however - Robertson won them all himself).
If the All Blacks don’t win the World Cup in France this year, this will come to be viewed as the strangest four-year holding pattern in modern New Zealand rugby history, an entire cycle where the only thing about the All Blacks that grew was the average age of its audience.
If they do spring a minor upset and win, it looks like something else entirely, I’m just not sure what. An embarrassment for all those from the top of the NZR tree to the lowest limbs of the media who had a collective loss of faith in the current set-up? A giant middle-finger from the “old guard” to the new? Or perhaps it looks like a movie? If Beaver can get a film for a kicking a goal with an ill-fitting shirt, then surely Ian Foster (played by Jon Favreau), gets some celluloid love for being effectively pink-slipped before the biggest coaching moment of his life?
But I digress, The Bounce’s interest in the announcement wasn't so much what Scott Robertson picked up, but what he left behind - which is carnage in Super Rugby.
Three clubs searching for new coaches. That’s just the big-ticket item, too. Any new coach will have their own vision of how the club should run and often that vision involves new assistants and/or support staff. It is, generally speaking, a hugely disruptive process.
There is something startlingly inefficient about taking three head coaches out of a professional rugby competition (that’s close to 50-plus games worth of leadership per year including playoffs) and spreading them across one team that plays about 14 matches per year.
That’s the glass-half-empty way of looking at it. The glass half full is that this is a perfect illustration of pathways for New Zealand coaches working properly.
I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to mitigate the disruption, but I do wonder if it’s worth looking at a system where the head coach of the All Blacks has a skeleton full-time staff and the bulk of his assistants remained with Super clubs before joining the national team (much like players do). Even writing that sentence I can envisage several fish-hooks, but if you want public buy-in for Super Rugby, you somehow have to convince the paying public that the New Zealand clubs are more than simply development tools.
The NFL draft is taking place today in Kansas City, Missouri. It is the most extravagantly packaged human stockyard ever conceived. As a pointless thought exercise, take whatever profession you work in and imagine qualifying for it, declaring it is indeed the field you want to work in, and then having to watch on TV, along with about 11 million other people, as to whether any of the 32 companies that employ people like you are interested in what you can offer.
Is it any wonder that young men, sometimes look like this below when it dawns on them they might not be as sought-after as they were led to believe? (Don’t feel too sorry for Aaron Rodgers, whose career worked out just fine.)
As an aside, it is 25 years since arguably the most famous draft of all, when the US sporting public was split as to which quarterback, the cerebral game manager with the family ties in Peyton Manning or the impossibly strong-armed Ryan Leaf, should be picked No1. Newsday polled 20 general managers, 14 said they’d take Leaf.
The Indianapolis Colts took Manning; the San Diego Chargers took Leaf at No2.
Manning carved out a Hall of Fame career, set almost every passing record imaginable, won two Super Bowls — one with the Colts, one with the Broncos — and stands as one of history’s greatest quarterbacks, a legend by every measure.
Leaf, of course, busted in a sad and incendiary way. After just four years, he was out of the league, his short tenure in San Diego marked by poor play and immaturity. It serves little purpose to delve too deeply into Leaf’s terrible post-draft fall, his mental-health decline, his descent into addiction, all of it culminating in legal troubles and prison stays — including one 32-month stint for breaking into a home in Montana to steal prescription drugs and violating terms of his Texas probation.
Full story of that momentous draft day in The Athletic ($).
THE WEEKEND THAT WILL BE
Just your semi-regular reminder this segment is not an exhaustive list of what’s on, but a selection of sporting morsels I will be attempting to watch.
This has all the hallmarks of a barnburner… or it could be a cagey waste of time with half an eye to a likely rematch at the pointy end of the season. I’m going to pick the former as I don’t think these two teams have it in them to go anything less than full noise.
Chiefs v Crusaders, Hamilton, tomorrow 7.05pm, Sky Sport 1
If Kane Williamson can’t make it as a player to this year’s World Cup, I couldn’t care less whether they take him as a “mentor”, the kit man or accordionist in the team band. Anything but captain and No3 batter will be a grave disappointment. The only line in the linked story I was interested in was this from Gary Stead: “Our line around Kane, at the moment, is still it’s unlikely that he will be available, but we certainly don't want to rule out a person of his class and calibre.”
Meanwhile, in a land far from here, the Black Caps will try to even the series after faltering in this morning’s first match. Will Young and Daryl Mitchell batted beautifully but when they went to press the accelerator at the end they found themselves in a Bedford truck rather than a Lotus Elise. It was a really strange configuration having four left-handers coming in from No 4-7 - Tom Latham, Mark Chapman, Henry Nicholls and Rachin Ravindra - with only Chapman noted as a potential power hitter from ball one.
Pakistan v NZ, 2nd ODI, Rawalpindi, tomorrow 10.30pm, Sky Sport 2
I will argue until I am muzzled that the Warriors, regardless of bad luck or bad officiating, let Melbourne off the hook on Anzac Day. It’s the walking wounded out at Penrose at the moment, but those still on two legs get another chance to topple a heavyweight, this time at home.
NZ Warriors v Easts, Auckland, Sunday 4pm, Sky Sport 4
The NBA playoffs have been wild, with the No 1 seed in the East, the Milwaukee Bucks gone, the No 2 Boston Celtics struggling mightily to beat an average Atlanta Hawks team, and the No4 Cavaliers brushed aside by the New York Knicks! In the west, the No2 and 3 seeds, the Memphis Grizzlies and Sacramento Kings are both on the brink, though their opponents, the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors respectively, have pedigree.
Lakers v Grizzlies, Gm6, Los Angeles, tomorrow 2.30pm, ESPN
The Mairangi Bay Netball Oracle says this weekend’s top-o’-the-table clash between the Tactix and the Mystics in Christchurch will be EPIC. What’s more, the Mystics will DEFINITELY win (probably), if players like Michaela Sokolic-Beatson and Tayla Earle are fully fit. The Mystics lead, but they also have a game in hand. Drama!
Tactix v Mystics, Christchurch, Sunday 2.30pm, Sky Sport 1
Can’t say I’ve been overly enamoured of the racing in the Gen3 cars, but they’ve had a lot of time since the Melbourne GP weekend round to tinker.
Supercars, Race 9, Perth, Sunday 7.45pm, Sky Sport 5
If you want to find any information about how the Black Sticks men’s and women’s teams are going in their matches against Australia and Great Britain, do NOT go to the Black Sticks website.
From what I can gather, neither the men or the women have won or drawn a game yet, but the men get another chance tonight against Great Britain.
NZ v GB (men’s), tonight 7.40pm; NZ v GB (women’s), tomorrow 2.10pm; NZ v Australia (men’s), Sunday 2.10pm; NZ v Australia (women’s), Sunday 4.40pm, all Christchurch, all Spark Sport
