Tilting at windmills

A admin-heavy Week That Was and a Clayton's Weekend That Will Be

One of these boxes was unnecessary. Getty Images

Did anything happen this week?

As was widely forecast, the provincial unions overwhelmingly voted (69-21) for their own Proposal 2 at today’s Special General Meeting, tipping the sneering antipathy between “real rugby folk” and the professional players into divorce.

To which I say, “Good, get on with it; the kids are sick of having to turn the TV up loud to drown out the sound of you fighting.”

Some of the discourse around the whole thing has been beyond deflating, but in many ways that fits into the zeitgeist. Ask yourself this: How many times over the past four years have you been at a barbecue, or stood pint-in-hand at a pub-leaner when the conversation about rugby has been positive?

If your life is anything like mine, it was probably after the World Cup quarter-final, but that’s about it.

Rugby chat has become a giant oxidation pond, where people, many of whom genuinely love/d the game, come to get excrement off their chest.

The past fortnight has crystallised that.

Forget the personalities. That’s a sideshow. As a friend who works at rugby’s coalface says, “Rob Nichol is a lightning rod for a certain section of New Zealand, and that section tends to end up on rugby boards.”

Forget, also, what you assume the people who serve on provincial rugby boards look and sound like.

Disregard the private-equity clustertruck and Silver Lake’s revenue-scraping-in-perpetuity and try to put to one side that the deal was used as a blunt instrument for the below review.

Ignore, even, whether you think a fully independent board would make a huge difference to the game as opposed to one that insists on prior provincial rugby representation.

Put all those pre-existing biases aside and unless I’m missing the master-key that unlocks this issue, this is what it boils down to:

• A review into the governance of a struggling game was commissioned.

• The reviewers, deemed to be experts in their field, made findings, which were brutal while at the same time obvious to anybody who has cared about this sport for long enough.

• They made recommendations, which, although obviously not universally popular, were easy enough to implement.

So… and this is the part that cracks me up, a group of people whose body of work was reviewed and found to be lacking in both the understanding and delivery of good governance, sat back and went, “Hmmm, I get where you guys are coming from, but leave it with us, we have a few ideas of our own.” 

So we now find ourselves inside some of the denser pages of a Kafka novel, where the PUs noted the points made about the PUs and used the power vested in them by the PUs to come up with a compromise devised by the PUs for the benefit of the PUs. 

Then put out a press release with a chef’s kiss of a pay-off line (emphasis and all-caps is mine):

“‘[This weekend] 150,000 people will be out on the playing fields, and the provincial unions will continue their work, UNCHANGED.”

Dear me.

***

Jamie Wall at RNZ takes a sanguine approach to the shemozzle.

But the main question now is what the RPA’s next move will be. Nichol had aggressively pushed for the Pilkington Report’s findings to be implemented, getting some heavyweight support this week publicly from former All Black captains Richie McCaw, Sean Fitzpatrick and Ian Kirkpatrick. Nichol’s talk of forming their own governing body is something that sounds big in a Super League-esque sort of way.

In reality, it certainly won’t have those sorts of ramifications for the sport. In fact, it might end up being a net positive as a separate entity for professional rugby could very much streamline that area of the game and leave NZR to simply run the representative teams and everything beneath Super Rugby.

Versions of that model are in place in England and France, and while the English club game has been in a precarious spot over the last few years, you certainly can’t argue with rugby’s popularity and engagement with fans in France right now.

Seems sensible enough, though when comparing the state of the English and French game, as Trevor McKewen noted in his sports business column yesterday ($), the Premiership took on private equity cash and it’s widely been regarded as a disastrous move, while France hasn’t.

Gregor Paul ($) also opined on the vote, but he was feeling far more spiky than Wall. 

The provinces will sit on the margins – isolated and effectively disenfranchised. They will discover that they didn’t vote themselves into a position of power at the special general meeting, but like the fabled dog with the bone seeing its reflection, will lose what they had because of a misjudged overreach.

The only unknown in rugby’s future is how long it will take for the unions to realise the mistake they have made and return to the negotiating table, and how much damage will be caused in the interim. The unions have seriously misread the respective opportunities and threats each of the two governance-change proposals presented both to them specifically and to the overall health of rugby generally.

Sounds apocalyptic, although the line about the fabled dog made me spontaneously guffaw (and as a rule I’m not a spontaneous guffawer).

‘Where did it all go wrong?’ Getty Images

Richard Knowler sits on the fence, but is not without valid points.

The NZRPA was entitled to seek change - and it’s difficult to disagree with the view that the Pilkington Review should have been endorsed - but you do wonder how the people of New Zealand would feel about this saga getting to the point where the players pick up their jockstraps and break away from NZ Rugby.

The NZRPA does a lot of good for the game, it stuck to its guns when NZ Rugby tried to ram through the Silver Lake deal a few years ago, but it should also bear in mind that the ongoing arguing can start to wear thin for everyone.

Amen to the last point, which is why I’ll briefly return to the top. The PUs might have won yesterday, or just as likely it was the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. Whatever, rugby was fundamentally broken before the vote for Proposal 2. Separate governance for the pro and community games now seems inevitable, so make it swift, make it clean and get on with generating some rugby conversations that don’t require an eight-pack of Sorbent to clean up afterwards.