Cone of silence not at all smart
The irony of the venting about the load management programme restricting the Super Rugby involvement of All Blacks is that it won’t exist next year.
This is the last year the All Blacks will be managed this way — where they face a graduated return to play protocol and then must sit out at least two games during the season.
It won’t be happening next year because it won’t need to. Super Rugby, which will revert to a 14-team round-robin competition, will start in the third week of February, giving test players a 12-week off-season.
That’s enough time to rest and recondition appropriately and take part in pre-season fixtures.
New Zealand Rugby should be making this known.
The shorter competition — there will be 13 round-robin games as opposed to 16 — means there’s no need to skip any.
Then there is going to be a twoweek gap between the Super Rugby final and the first test in July, so the All Blacks will be able to assemble, without any need to host training camps as they have in the past during the Super Rugby season.
The problem has been fixed. Load management is already an antiquated term and yet NZR continues to stay silent, allowing the uninformed and indignant to own the agenda and further batter the reputation of the game.
NZR need to wake up to the need to win the public relations battle. It should set the media agenda and control the narrative.
The sad truth is, though, NZR often feels it doesn’t need the media. It still lives in a forgotten world where rugby doesn’t need to promote itself — it is too big, too popular to explain itself.
In the history of public relations, it has never proven a bad idea to get the story out first — tell it on your terms. Yet NZR seldom do.
An organisation with media savvy would never have stayed quiet about this year’s load management protocol. The smart play was to explain that it was a one-season-only directive.
Instead, NZR said nothing, let Super Rugby clubs moan about it publicly and give the impression they had never agreed to it when they did.
Highlanders assistant coach Tony Brown even suggested the policy had been responsible for killing the test careers of a few of the club’s former players, which did untold damage to the game.
NZR has again been cast as the bad guy — controlling, secretive and dictatorial.
It’s unfair, but when it says nothing, it sets up the organisation for negative publicity.
Just as curious is the decision to not be transparent about the McKinsey Report.
By all accounts, NZR is planning the biggest restructuring of the sport in the professional age and yet it wants to do it behind closed doors. NZR think it is a smart plan to fully brief the provinces about what they are thinking and not the media.
That’s not smart — it’s potentially disastrous, as the provinces will spin things their own way. This is the information age and yet NZR continues to believe silence is its best means of dealing with major issues.
It makes no sense to be reticent to divulge — and even less when the media have some idea what is in the report, but not all of it.
Since the Herald revealed what was happening last week, there has been no shortage of debate. But how much of it has been properly informed?
Some people have taken the liberty of filling in the areas where there is an information void and NZR watch silently, no doubt enraged at some of the inaccuracies and lack of context.
But still it says nothing, as if the media are a law unto themselves; beyond being controlled or at least being steered in a direction that promotes a better public understanding of where the national game is being taken.
NZR can’t win a public relations war when it doesn’t realise it is in one.