In tough times turn to the chairman
Owen Franks is probably the closest a front-row forward has ever come to trending.
Luke Jacobson, the 22-year-old “bolter” with a Cambridge education (High, not University), has done it.
But neither the “great omission” nor the “surprise inclusion” stole the show at the All Blacks World Cup team naming. That honour went to Brent Impey.
Looking like someone who learned at 11.45am that the team naming was at midday, not 1pm, Impey was the bed-headed man whose every word we hung on.
He welcomed the room with greetings in all the languages of the players’ heritages he was about to read out. There were subtle clues to be found in this: there would be no Portuguese-speaking players selected.
Then, with all the gravitas of a wartime prime minister, he began reading the names.
“Beauden Barrett, Blues and Taranaki . . . ”
It’s hard to remember the last time Barrett played for Taranaki and given he’s yet to suit up for the Blues it seemed an unnecessarily cruel burn of the Hurricanes.
Once he’d got through all the extended Barrett family it was hard to maintain interest, though the inclusion of the perpetually injured Ryan Crotty raised an eyebrow.
That meant that the name read out after Nepo Laulala was unlikely to be Ngani Laumape.
Life can be cruel, but at least he would have received a call to let him know and there were no cameras to record his distress, unlike in 1991 when the chairman of the board went from Jason Hewett to Craig Innes while the unlucky Laurence Hullena was in the room.
On Impey chuntered, to Angus Ta’avao, which meant no Liam Squire, the mystery man of New Zealand rugby judging by the contradictory headlines we’ve read about his availability/selection prospects in the past few weeks.
Patrick Tuipulotu was picked though, indicating that Brodie Retallick’s body is fragile enough that the selectors felt they couldn’t fudge it with three specialist locks and a hybrid lock-loosie.
Now we were into the Ws and the cruel alphabetic trick that had all the Sonny Bill haters on edge until the very last name.
He’s going, time to get angry. With that, the camera shifted from Impey to Steve Hansen, where it should have been all the time.
Why does tradition dictate that some dishevelled old dude gets to read out the most important squad in the history of the last four years?
It’s not chairman Impey’s horse that Cantabrians are going to spit at when the All Blacks return home after a crushing semifinal defeat. The board chose Hansen to select this squad and they’ve left him in charge of coaching it. Hansen, not the board, rang the players most unlucky to miss out.
But he’s not allowed to read out his team.
When it was time for Hansen to talk, it was obvious he’d spent the morning with an online thesaurus. He had a few buzzwords to share.
Hard. Tough. Massive task. Pressure. Scrutiny. Expectation. Most fiercely contested. Pressure. Expectation. Overwhelming.
Any doubts about what an overwhelmingly massive task it was to win a fiercely contested World Cup under the pressure of highly scrutinised expectation were laid to rest. This will be tough. It will be hard.
We can cope though, and it’s comforting to know that in tough times of hardness, we can turn to the chairman for comfort.