Black Ferns deserved winners
OPINION: Beating the All Blacks to World Rugby’s team of the year award is proof of the massive strides taken by the Black Ferns and the women’s game.
Fair play to them. The Ferns have had a better year than the All Blacks, winning the Rugby World Cup in style whereas Steve Hansen’s side lost two tests and could only draw a home series with the British and Irish Lions.
Their gong in Monaco - ahead of the All Blacks and Eddie Jones’ English millionaires - is a victory for women’s rugby and for the amateur arm of the game.
A smattering of Black Ferns are paid pros on the world sevens circuit, but part of the Black Ferns’ appeal is forged on their status as plucky part-timers, balancing day jobs or study with wearing the silver fern as proudly as any All Black.
It’s always hard comparing different divisions of the same game.
Yes, the international men’s rugby scene is a more competitive environment than the women’s equivalent where only England can give New Zealand a decent game.
But the Black Ferns - through their high skill level and tryscoring deeds of world player of the year Portia Woodman - have set a new benchmark.
They’ve now won five World Cups to three by the All Blacks.
So, all power to the World Rugby judges.
Only one member of the eightperson panel, former England flanker Maggie Alphonsi, is female. But she, and some of her fellow adjudicators, including extest captains Richie McCaw, Brian O’Driscoll, John Smit and George Gregan, aren’t long out of the game.
They’re a generation or two removed from the patrician rugby buffers whose after-match homilies invariably included: ‘‘Thanks to the ladies in the kitchen.’’
The players’ pay packets may not yet reflect it, but New Zealanders have been starting to take the Black Ferns seriously for some time.
In a long overdue cultural shift, the 21st century has become a golden era for New Zealand women’s sport.
Cyclist Sarah Ulmer, rowing twins Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell, shot putter Valerie Adams, golfer Lydia Ko
and Paralympics swimmer Sophie Pascoe have been among the biggest stars of New Zealand sport - up there beside the All Blacks, basketballer Steven Adams and rowers Mahe Drysdale, Eric Murray and Hamish Bond.
Eight of the 17 supreme Halberg Award crowns between 2000 and
2016 have been won by women athletes or teams, compared with nine in the 50-year period between
1949 (the inaugural year) and 1999.
The Black Ferns should be finalists for team of the year at the 2017 Halbergs. Whether they deserve to win over the America’s Cup yachting crew, or even the Black Sox softballers, is a moot point.
But the national women’s team has put women’s rugby on the Kiwi sporting map - and now they’ve gone global.
How long before more people watch the Black Ferns on TV than
netball’s struggling Silver Ferns?
The Black Ferns’ success has also had a spinoff effect for their sporting sisters in the Kiwi Ferns (some of whom are double internationals).
The New Zealand’s women’s rugby league team has enjoyed more publicity at this World Cup tournament than ever before – helped in part by the fact that they have done something David Kidwell’s Kiwis men couldn’t – make a final against the Australians.
Like Portia Woodman before her, Kiwi Fern Honey Hireme has been turning heads with her tryscoring feats after11 tournament touchdowns (and counting).
The United States women’s football team - winners of three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals - have a bigger public and media profile than their men’s teams.
The Black Ferns and Kiwi Ferns may never attract the same following as their male counterparts, but more and more sporting sceptics are beginning to admit - like World Rugby’s enlightened judges - that women can play both rugby codes with skill, power and panache.
We’ll never know the answer, but one question remains from the World Rugby judging process: Did Richie McCaw vote for the Black Ferns or abstain due to his All Blacks’ allegiance?
You’d like to think after following wife Gemma and her Black Sticks hockey team at the Rio Olympics, he’d be a convert to the women’s sport cause.