From the front row to the top table for rugby legend
Word reaches me that a woman is to be appointed to the board of New Zealand Rugby at last, and she is from Manawatu.
Yes, we can reveal the 43-yearold mother of two energetic kids, Farah Palmer, has been shouldertapped to step up.
She will sit alongside the middle-aged big boys as the female pioneer around the top table of our biggest sport.
If anyone was to break the male shackles it would be Palmer, rather than someone plucked out of the corporate world on the basis of her gender and convoluted letters after her name.
NZR sounds like an acronym for New Zealand Railways, but it was derailed by the Chiefs’ strippergate this year and the Losi Filipo shambles.
After that, rugby was perceived to be a closed shop peopled by white middle-class stale males, many of whom to this day still snort down their hairy noses at women’s rugby.
As a Massey University senior lecturer in the school of management, Palmer has held countless rugby positions, including Manawatu’s old council of clubs, since her playing days ended in 2006 after winning her third world cup.
She would often flit off to Europe for International Rugby Board women’s meetings and has been a fixture on the New Zealand Maori Rugby Board for a decade as an independent member.
That board is entitled to a delegate on the NZR board and with Northland’s Wayne Peters stepping down from that role after eight years, Palmer is expected to be ratified as the Maori board chair, at a special general meeting next month.
For many years she served on my Manawatu Standard club rugby picks panel and kept picking the underdogs.
That experience will be absolutely crucial, if not quite on a par with her PHD in sport sociology.
This year she was also co-opted on to the NZR’S rugby subcommittee.
Whenever asked for comment about national rugby matters, notably about the oft-ignored women’s game, she didn’t hold back.
So on that basis, and as a former bodybuilder, she will make herself heard at the board table, although for public comment she will be gagged.
Only the chiefs may comment.
The Manawatu Rugby Union this year appointed their first female director, Sarah Vining, who is also expected to see issues from a different perspective.
As an aside, Palmer and hubbie Wesley Clarke will probably need to enlist home help as Clarke pursues his coaching with the Black Ferns.
Beauden’s kicks rebounded
Thank heavens for the All Blacks’ lineout getting them through their last tango in Paris.
The lineout was the main source of ball and it enabled Beauden Barrett to kick most it back to the grateful French.
Beauden plays exciting rugby. His cross kick set up a try and then there was that intercept.
But he had implanted the coaches’ kicking order indelibly in his software because he kept chipkicking or was too shallow with his punts. And yet media-watchers praised him as man of the match – one even gave him a 9.
The All Blacks were (again) praised for their defence and the Froggies for their attacking flair. But still our guys can’t get through many phases when they see the ball and wouldn’t have to tackle forever if they didn’t hoof the ball straight back to the enemy.
Barry’s trash talk is trash
Joseph Parker’s boxing coach Kevin Barry must believe the public are as stupid as his hair.
Barry came back from Las Vegas to tell us Andy Ruiz jun will have superior hand speed, is more experienced and is the favourite to beat his man on December 10.
Maybe Barry hopes Ruiz is gullible and will read his propaganda. Ruiz is such a chubby tubby he looks as if he has been on double rations for all of his 27 years. He should have to wear a shirt over his Michelin midsection in his fights.
If Ruiz is of such merit, then surely the American promoters would have held the fight in Trumpsville instead of little old New Zealand.
Ruiz will fair bounce when he hits the canvas.
New theatre sprung
Word reaches me that the proposed new boutique movie theatre in Palmerston North is likely to be in Cuba St.
The proposed location has been of much interest to those Cinema Golders cut off at the knees.
The building in question on Cuba St is almost opposite the entrance to George St; but hold fire – it will take a year or two to set up.