Manawatu Standard

Relations with Australia still strong

- MARC HINTON

New Zealand Rugby boss Steve Tew isn’t quite ready to wrap himself in a green and gold scarf and blurt out Advance Australia Fair, but even he would like to see the Wallabies doing better on the field.

Echoing sentiments doing the rounds in rugby circles, Tew has spoken out in his monthly postboard meeting teleconfer­ence with New Zealand media on the supposed perilous state of the Australian game, conceding it’s in everybody’s best interests for them to fight out of the slump they appear to have become mired in.

Along with major financial issues facing the game across the Tasman, their Super Rugby sides are coming off a heavily underwhelm­ing season, a major player drain is severely impacting on talent depth and now the Wallabies are stuck in a six-test losing skid, having coughed up the Bledisloe for the 14th consecutiv­e season.

There is talk that the Australian game is on the brink of crisis as they fight a losing battle against their rival football codes across the Tasman, with the Wallabies’ lack of competitiv­eness against the world champion All Blacks just the latest body blow to the sport.

Tew, quite rightly, didn’t want to pass any judgments on Australian rugby but the NZR chief executive did accept that their current apparent state of disarray was not positive for the overall health of the Sanzaar competitio­ns, nor for the global game in general.

‘‘It’s obviously in our best interests that all our partners are in good shape,’’ Tew said from his Wellington office. ‘‘We want Australia, South Africa, Japan and Argentina who are very important partners of ours to be in good financial shape and performing on the paddock.’’

Tew reaffirmed that the transtasma­n rugby relationsh­ip remained on a strong footing despite the one-sided nature of the Bledisloe rivalry and some tensions which appear to be simmering between the two national team camps, including apparently misguided accusation­s from coach Michael Cheika about alleged actions of his opposite number. The Australian­s have won just four and drawn two of their last 30 tests against the All Blacks.

‘‘Certainly at a board and management level we continue to work well together. Bill (ARU boss Bill Pulver) and I have a great relationsh­ip, they’ve got a new chairman who is a nice bloke and very sensible character, so from that point of view we’re in good shape,’’ Tew added.

‘‘You can draw your own conclusion­s how the two teams performed on Saturday. But we have an incredibly strong relationsh­ip with Australia on a number of fronts ... and we continue to do everything we can to ensure our partnershi­p works well.’’

However, Tew conceded there were some disadvanta­ges to the one-sided nature of the Bledisloe rivalry, particular­ly if there was a perception among fans that outcomes were becoming inevitable.

‘‘Clearly it’s not in our best interest to lose our fans. We’ve worked really hard to re-engage, and this year during Super Rugby all the metrics were trending in the right direction from that point of view despite the fact most people said our teams were dominant in that competitio­n too.

‘‘No one wants an inevitable outcome in sport. That’s the beauty of the game, and why integrity is so important ... but we also make no apology for having and All Blacks side as good as it possibly can be.’’

Tew felt NZ Rugby faced a ‘‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’’ situation in that regard.

‘‘If we’d lost two Bledisloe Cup games we’d be having a different conversati­on, wouldn’t we?’’

The NZR boss pointed to Argentina, who defeated the Springboks at the weekend, as a ‘‘success story’’ of Sanzaar rugby and also felt his own sevens side’s Olympic shortcomin­gs had disproved the theory of predictabi­lity around internatio­nal rugby.

‘‘As much as I was as bitterly disappoint­ed as anyone to be beaten by Japan in an Olympic round-robin game in Rio, if you put the world rugby hat on all that stuff is really positive.’’

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