Give it a rest: Breaks reach absurd levels
Crusaders No 13 Braydon Ennor has played 13 minutes of test rugby and was left out of the World Cup squad last year.
He is 22 and didn’t play last week because the Crusaders had the bye.
The same Braydon Ennor also won’t play against the Reds tonight because he is on the first of his two All Blacks rest weeks.
Welcome to New Zealand, where rugby bosses are desperately trying to make young men who don’t want to play the game any more to play the game, but tell those who do want to play the game that they can’t play the game.
Apologies if that sounds facetious, but we have all now surely exhausted patience with All Blacks rest weeks and can drop the civility for a while.
Players hate it, supporters hate it and coaches hate it.
Jordie Barrett cut a sheepish figure when interviewed on Sky Sport last week about playing golf instead of playing for the Hurricanes against the Sunwolves. He didn’t want to be.
And as for Ennor, you feel for him.
This Crusaders backline is so stacked that the last thing you’d want as a player is to be ‘rested’, particularly when you are still learning the game at centre.
What if Leicester Faingaanuku marches over multiple Reds and looks irresistible on the left wing and George Bridge looks like the new Ben Smith at fullback? Suddenly, David Havili becomes a midfield possibility again and Jack Goodhue isn’t going to be dropped for the big games.
As for the All Blacks, what exactly is Ennor resting for?
Would he make the starting XV if the team was picked today, ahead of Goodhue and Anton Lienert-Brown?
Probably not. Would he even make the match-day 23 with Ngani Laumape offering the power option?
If the answer is again no, Ennor’s case becomes more absurd, and it is not an isolated one.
At the Highlanders, loose forward Shannon Frizell made the World Cup squad because Liam Squire opted out and Luke Jacobson had concussion issues.
Yet Frizell has been forced to have a delayed return to Super Rugby this year (and his form shows it) while other such as Hoskins Sotutu, Tom Robinson and Cullen Grace get a jump on him in the race for that vacant No 6/No 8 position.
Frizell was ‘rested’ last week as the Highlanders fell to the Rebels.
But, New Zealand Rugby will say, there is precedent for resting Ennor and the system is working.
It wasn’t last year. Not when the All Blacks were dominated in a World Cup semifinal by a side (England) whose country-club system is the antithesis of the New Zealand system.
Isn’t that the point? The setup is supposed to guarantee that the All Blacks peak mentally and physically at the right moments during the year.
Yet, there they were getting blown off the park by English players whose primary employers are their clubs.
It’s at moments like these you yearn for the cold, bottom-line thinking of the venture capital vultures hovering around the game. Can you imagine the reaction of those hard heads to something like the All Blacks’ rest protocols?
‘‘So, we have just pumped a significant amount of money into a struggling Super Rugby but you’re telling us you’re not going to play your best players?’’
There would only be one loser in that argument but it would produce a lot of winners, not least the Super Rugby fans whose time and money makes the whole thing work.
We have all now surely exhausted patience with All Blacks rest weeks.