Super Rugby
kicks off again
Beauden Barrett has spent plenty of time visualising how this fixture will play out. Since the All Blacks first-five and former Hurricanes stalwart announced his switch to the Blues this season, there’s been one match at the forefront of his mind: the meeting against his old side.
‘‘It’s a game that I have played a fair few times in my head already,’’ said a jovial Barrett, fronting a media conference this week.
‘‘It’s been a long time coming.’’ The first few iterations of his imagined Blues debut played out in a far different scenario to that which will transpire at Eden Park on tomorrow afternoon.
Barrett’s return to the field after a post-World Cup sabbatical had originally been earmarked for round 11 of the competition, in what was certain to be the key talking point of the Easter weekend match-ups.
Now, following the Covid-19 enforced shutdown of the multinational Super Rugby competition, his debut comes within a much more significant debut – the opening round of Super Rugby Aotearoa. This weekend is not just Barrett’s comeback, it is rugby’s comeback.
The kick-off of the all-New Zealand franchise competition will be the first professional rugby competition in the world to have crowds return en-masse in the Covid-19 era.
Fans have seized on that opportunity to be a part of the social experience of live sport again. The Blues are anticipating a crowd in excess of 35,000 for the match, while the opening game between the Highlanders and Chiefs at Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium tonight is expected to be a shade under capacity of 23,000.
This week’s frenzied unrolling of plans to welcome fans back to the grounds following the government’s announcement of a move to level one on Monday has mimicked the pace at which the rest of the competition has come together.
New competitions typically take months, even years, in the planning. NZ Rugby had just a matter of weeks to come up with a new format, schedule, rules and operational guidelines in order to get a product back out on the park this weekend.
Decisions that would normally be nutted out in the course of a few months following extensive consultation and review, were squared away within days.
‘‘It’s been a long couple of months, that’s for sure,’’ says Chris Lendrum, NZ Rugby’s head of professional rugby.
‘‘There’s been a tremendous amount of work that has had to go on, because not only are you rescoping a competition, but you’re overlaying a whole array of health and safety regulations and new constraints with respect to the Covid response, so bind all of that together and do it quickly involved huge amount of work from a tremendous amount of people.’’
The work was also going on against the backdrop of a brutal restructure at NZR HQ, as the national body prepares to cull up to 50 per cent of its workforce in the face of a $120m decline in revenue.
Many staff working across the numerous workstreams potentially won’t be around to see their plans or ideas executed.
Lendrum says it has been a challenging time for all in the organisation.
‘‘The one theme of the period has really been around how barriers have come down and people have been prepared to work together and collaborate in the broader interests of the game,’’ he says. ‘‘This has been an opportunity for NZ Rugby to take back a large element of control of the management and operation of the competition.’’
Without the competing selfinterests of the other Sanzaar nations, and the need for extensive consultation with other national unions, NZR have taken a more nimble approach to rule changes and innovations. The national body were quickly able to introduce a number of innovations for Super Rugby
Aotearoa including a golden point trial, allowing red carded players to return to the field after 20 minutes, and a change in application of refereeing the breakdown.
Lendrum acknowledges some of the innovations have proven controversial, but he says all were the subject of robust debate.
A CLUB DIVIDED
As the Blues squad filed in for their first day back at training last month, they returned to a club divided.
A line had been carved out through the middle of the team’s headquarters, separating the playing group from the front office staff.
Life had returned to the Blues facility, but not as they knew it.
There were individual health checks each day on arrival, within the ‘‘contact bubble’’ the group was divided up further into smaller pods for training in the gym, which was sanitised after each session.
The on-field trainings were also initially held in these smaller groups, split between morning and afternoon sessions. Team and group meetings were held over zoom conference calls, while players carried out their individual video work at home.
Richard Fry, the team’s manager, says the team were adhering to stricter guidelines than the general public.
‘‘The idea is across the country NZ Rugby, working with the Ministry of Health, are trying to have a known Super Rugby contact bubble, of all the people across all the teams – and that extends out to knowing where they live and who they live with,’’ says Fry.
But the biggest constraint for the players and coaching staff are working under is time.
Usually, leading into a competition the players have around six weeks of contact training. This time they have only had three weeks to build back into it.
‘‘It has added a whole bunch of different considerations and I think that will even increase once we get to game time. A lot of the compliance around the travel and match day logistics are quite rigorous and we’re going to have to be on our game to make sure everyone adheres to it properly, but there’s a lot of people working on this,’’ Fry said.
Cathy Newman, the Chiefs’ match operations manager, was charged with grappling the logistics of staging games under Covid-19 restrictions.
It’s Newman’s job to make sure all Chiefs home games are run in accordance with the protocols put out by Sanzaar and NZR. She pulls together all the different functional areas for the game day – the requirements of the teams, match officials, sideline management, match doctors, ball kids. She’s also the conduit for venue management, security and hospitality.
Newman is used to having to keep a whole lot of plates spinning. But the past couple of months has been unlike anything the veteran official has experienced in her career.
‘‘It was pretty crazy actually, there was a whole heap of stuff going on in the background in terms of pulling it altogether,’’ says Newman.
‘‘If we even go back two weeks we were planning on having the teams fly in and fly out on the same day, so that meant a whole lot of different logistical arrangements we had to put together for them in terms of getting them to the city early, putting them in a space where they could be comfortable for up to five hours, feed them, water them, provide an area for them to have a stretch and do their pre-game primers and then 90 minutes out you flip into event mode and they come into the ground.
‘‘Then there were all the extra Covid-19 things around health screening, a master access list to the ground.’’ Then, one day last week, it became apparent to Newman that a lot of the planning was about to be scrapped.
‘‘I remember going home to my husband one night last week and saying to him ‘I think I’m going to have to shelve all this stuff now and start again on Monday’,’’ Newman chuckles.
‘‘We went from talking about having really tight restrictions around the number of people that we would allow into the ground to ‘let’s fill up the stadium with 25,000 people and have a good time’. I don’t mind one bit. It’s definitely put a spring in the step.’’
SKY’S THE LIMIT
Monday’s announcement of a move to level one also relieved a lot of headaches at Sky TV.
Along with the logistical challenges of trying to produce a world-class broadcast with only a skeleton number of staff permitted at the ground, the big concern occupying the brains trust at Sky was how to create any sort of atmosphere in a big empty stadium.
Sky’s director of sport and broadcasting, Tex Teixeira, had watched closely the approaches taken by their colleagues overseas in the likes of Germany’s Bundesliga, and, closer to home, the NRL. They’d even considered superimposing crowds into the stands, but that plan was scrapped due to the risk that the ball would disappear from screens whenever it went into the air.
Texeira said Sky were planning to replicate the approach taken by the NRL and pipe in crowd noise, as well as offering a clean feed for the ‘‘purists’’.
‘‘I watched the Warriors games and some of the other NRL games and I could see that our colleagues at Nine were trying really hard to hype it up and really drive the energy, but there were moments where it just lacked that true vibe.
‘‘And I think for the players as well being able to turn around and look at the crowd, or playing up to the crowd when they score a try, that type of action is not there.
‘‘So to be honest I was quite nervous about how it would be received by our customers.
‘‘The Prime Minister kindly changed things for us, which we appreciate,’’ he joked.
The examples overseas reinforces that for those watching on television, spectators are necessary surrogates, challenging the ‘broadcast is king’ approach taken by NZR. This approach has long created tensions between the national body and Super Rugby franchises, who do not get a share of the broadcast deal, instead relying on gate-takings as their key revenue driver.
It also raises questions over NZR’s u-turn on the earlier kick-off times this season. The games were originally scheduled for 5pm on Saturdays and 3pm on Sundays to allow the visiting teams time after their match to fly back home that evening.
Teixiera confirmed once this requirement was removed Sky asked that the kick-off times be pushed back to 7pm on a Saturday.
‘‘It was a joint discussion. I’m not going to say Sky didn’t play a role, but we didn’t put our foot down on it either. We do know that people are creatures of habit and people are accustomed to Friday night and Saturday night games,’’ he says.
‘‘We were happy with the earlier kick-off, because we understood the situation. But when they came back to us and said ‘would you like a change?’ We did ask that the games could move the games slightly later.’’
The later kickoff times haven’t deterred crowds for round one at least.
After years of dwindling crowd numbers and declining engagement, the new era has been greeted enthusiastically by fans, bringing renewed hope to financially stressed franchises.
Highlanders chief executive Roger Clark this week stood beaming in the middle of the field at Forsyth Barr Stadium as he addressed assembled media and contemplated his great luck that Dunedin will be the first in the world to host a professional rugby match in front of crowds again.
‘‘It’s just great to get bums on seats and getting the tickets through the door.’’
Clark’s counterpart at the Blues, Andrew Hore, says it potentially changes the competition from being a cost centre to a revenuegenerating exercise.
‘‘The one theme of the period has really been around how barriers have come down.’’ Chris Lendrum NZ Rugby’s head of professional rugby
‘‘The Prime Minister kindly changed things for us, which we appreciate.’’ Tex Teixeira Sky’s director of sport and broadcasting on having crowds at games