NZ Rugby blindsides Super coaches
The NZ Rugby board should be angry about their organisation’s lack of consultation with Super Rugby coaches in the wake of revelations they will be forced to lose All Blacks to training camps this season.
Although NZ Rugby has yet to publicly state when the five teams must release their players - the thrust of the plan is that they miss trainings with their clubs but return for the games - everyone knows this has been declared a done deal.
The five Super Rugby coaches would be justified in feeling they have been ripped-off.
Their reputations are on the line in the Sanzaar competition, not those of the All Blacks coaches. Losing their most influential men to national camps instead of having them at home preparing for the next round of Super Rugby and it is understood there could be as many as four camps - is much more than an inconvenience. It is a major worry.
Why the Super Rugby coaches had to be informed by email, understood to be written by former high performance manager Don Tricker prior to Christmas, is hard to fathom.
That NZ Rugby didn’t invite the coaches to attend a meeting, where they could share ideas and search for alternatives, just seems wrong on so many levels. Maybe the Super Rugby coaches could have been offered alternatives. Shortening the 12-week non-playing summer schedule by a week, to allow the New Zealand teams to start the competition earlier and therefore allow the All Blacks to gather for the June test window a week sooner could have been a sensible solution.
Or if the All Blacks coaches wanted the players to sharpen specific skills, could they not ask that they do it while remaining with their Super Rugby teams? Perhaps NZ Rugby didn’t want to know.
This is the sort of culture we expect from the large, clumsy corporates many people love to hate. We have all heard the stories. So-and-so around the corridor seemed like a pretty decent bloke or woman, yet it didn’t save them getting shoved around from some piggy-eyed ambitious type that is desperate to hop-up to the next rung on the company ladder.
We expect better from NZ Rugby. We like to think they can be fair, even if they are a multimillion dollar business.
Obviously the success of the All Blacks matters a great deal. We all get that.
The longer the national team remains at the top of the World Rugby rankings, the better the chances of increasing their leverage when it comes to securing lucrative commercial deals and paying the coin required to keep our best players in this country. But it would be very wrong to think the New Zealand rugby story starts and stops with the All Blacks.
Since 1996 Super Rugby has been an integral part of the great Kiwi rugby machine, and there can be no denying the talent that have been developed by those teams.
Until the dates of the camps are made official, Super Rugby fans must wait to discover when their teams will be stripped of their stars prior to games.
The keenly awaited policy will most certainly have major ramifications. Because if, say, the Crusaders and Hurricanes are forced to shed key players prior to one of their derbies, robbing them of the chance to field a full team at trainings, they will be compromised.
To win Super Rugby, teams must top the NZ conference. The history books prove that.
The supporters of those teams, the people that NZ Rugby must recognise as their unofficial shareholders, have a right to feel shortchanged. So, too, do the Super Rugby coaches. They deserve better.