Rugby: A game over 80 minutes and Blues lose . . .
Another loss for the Blues and another reason to believe the club is trapped in a relentless cycle of failure they are powerless to break. Maybe it’s even worse than that, though: maybe all those connected with the club have come to believe the Blues can’t be fixed. Maybe they have given up dreaming of the day the Blues are something other than easybeats without direction.
Defeat has come to define them. Being in a perpetual state of chaos is what everyone has come to expect and it was noted that a strangely large crowd barely even managed to groan as the unforced errors piled up.
There is certainly no sense of outrage in the stands at how badly the team are playing. There has been little indignation from any quarter in fact, and coach and players would appear to have a licence to drift through this campaign in any state they choose and no one is going to particularly care.
That’s the truly sad part — that the Blues have made such a habit of losing that it is what everyone has come to accept.
In the same way as football was once described as a game played over 90 minutes and at the end Germany win, might now the same be said of rugby except that at the end of 80 minutes, the Blues lose?
Here we are eight weeks into the competition and they haven’t won at home. They have just two victories to their credit and they haven’t yet played the Crusaders or Hurricanes home or away.
Their season is over. The only questions now are just how bad is it going to be? And, amazingly, does anyone really care?
When the Blues were in a similar spot in 2012
— having won just one of their first seven
There is no anger. There is no indignation at the club again being in crisis and the total silence from the executive team suggests they aren’t so bothered about how things are tracking either.
games — coach Pat Lam was effectively fired and the city of Auckland felt like it was ready to come at him with pitch forks.
In 2015, the Blues were again in a similar mess and barely a day went by without some kind of venom being spat at coach John Kirwan.
But this year, there is no anger. There is no indignation at the club again being in crisis, and the total silence from the executive team suggests they aren’t so bothered about how things are tracking either.
No one is asking for the board to give coach Tana Umaga a dreaded vote of confidence, but it would be nice for the fans to hear from someone this week that there is an awareness that things can’t go on as they are.
The cycle of firing the coach and failing, hiring the coach and failing hasn’t got the club anywhere, and again, maybe someone should pop their head out of the boardroom this week and say as much.
And if they do, why not go the whole hog and say that Umaga’s contract is going to be extended?
Who knows if that would be the right call, but it would at least be a different approach in this decade-long battle to break the cycle of
failure in Auckland. The last thing coach Tana Umaga needs is a dreaded vote of confidence.