Super Rugby needs Pasifika boost
Pacific Island players are the gift the rugby world has happily grabbed without ever really being grateful. The All Blacks without Pasifika players would not only feel strange, but would also be nothing like the force they have been the past 20 years.
In Australian Super Rugby teams, Pasifika stars provide the backbone. Eddie Jones’ England side has the brilliant Tongan Billy Vunipola providing much of their go-forward from No 8. European club rugby is studded with the best from the Pacific.
But as Pacific Rugby Players’ Association chairman Hale T-Pole pointed out during the week, when it comes to a helping hand for Pasifika rugby, it’s almost completely a oneway street.
T-Pole is suggesting more Pacific Islanders be allowed to play Super Rugby in New Zealand while not being available for the All Blacks.
Instead they could turn out internationally for the Pacific country they qualify for by birth or ancestry. At the moment, our Super Rugby teams are allowed only three non-New Zealand players in their squad.
It’s an issue made more burning by the dirty little secret that many European clubs put huge pressure on their Pasifika players to turn down the chance to play for Samoa, Tonga or Fiji.
Before the World Cup last year, Samoan coach Steve Jackson spoke of the pressure French clubs were putting on Samoan players to stay away from Japan.
“What happens is that you’re tearing a player between their club and their country,” he said. “It’s just not fair on the players to make those decisions.
“We’d love to have them here, but there are certain players who won’t be coming, purely because of those reasons. The clubs don’t say they do it, but they do.”
Samoa’s captain at the Cup, Jack Lam, said when he looked at club contracts in France, a condition was “that I had to turn down the World Cup, and the opportunity to play for Samoa in the future as well”.
Lam took the decision to put country first, potentially at great financial risk to himself. Keep in mind that all European clubs are privately owned, so owners can freely operate like dictators with a private fiefdom. Just ask Julian Savea about Toulon, whose owner Mourad Boudjellal savaged him in public, saying he “wanted a DNA test” to prove the Savea playing for the club was actually the Savea he’d signed. There’s plenty wrong with Super Rugby, but because overall control rests with New Zealand Rugby officials, not with comic book magnates, there is usually a desire to do the best thing by the game.
Allowing more Pasifika internationals to ply their trade here, where T-Pole says they feel more at home than in Europe, feels like a win-win situation. It would make it much easier for Pacific national sides to organise themselves, improving international rugby.
And at a time when fans are lamenting the absence of All Blacks in Super Rugby, allowing more Pasifika stars into the competition would surely give an exciting shot in the arm to a competition that can always do with it.
The outbreak of mumps in the Brumbies unearthed the fact that Super Rugby has a policy that players should be inoculated against the disease.
Good on the Brumbies for taking blood tests and leaving four players behind when they travelled to Hamilton to play the Chiefs.
Rugby officials haven’t always been so sensible about players’ health. One of the most bizarre stories of contagious illness involves All Blacks prop Gary Knight having a hospital stay in Dublin during the 1978 Grand Slam tour of Britain and Ireland.
In the tour’s opening match, against Cambridge University, the All
Blacks noticed that one of the
Cambridge props had ugly sores on his face. In hindsight, they would realise it was herpes.
John
Ashworth was scrumming against the infected Englishman, and the next day at scrum training, propped against Knight. The infection spread to two other forwards, but Knight was the worst affected. Touring sides didn’t have their own doctor then, so treatment was piecemeal at best. In Wales, Knight, who after two weeks was playing with so many bandages stuck on his face with plasters, he looked like a wounded soldier, was prescribed penicillin by a Cardiff doctor.
At that point, the herpes erupted. “I was running a temperature, and looked like a candidate for a horror movie,” Knight would later tell author Bob Howitt.
Knight was so ill and weak, he was admitted to hospital. “They discovered that the penicillin they’d been pumping into me, far from killing the disease, was actually feeding it.”
It was another couple of weeks before he was well enough to play again. The legacy from his unfortunate experience was
the introduction of the charming phrase “scrum pox” into the sporting lexicon, and a belated warning by rugby officials that players with skin eruptions needed medical diagnosis before they were cleared to play.
The death of All Black Terry Lineen this week jogged some of my warmest childhood memories. Watching his four seasons from 1957 as a brilliant All Blacks secondfive made me a fan for life.
I saw him play live twice, once for Auckland against Waikato in Hamilton, and in the first test my father ever took me to, at Eden Park against the Lions in 1959, but saw highlights of all his 12 tests in black and white Caltex newsreels at the Waihi Beach movie theatre.
He was fast and daring, and, with all due respect to the men in black he played with, Lineen was the only one dashing enough, with his mop of jet black hair and film star looks, who would not have looked out of place on the set of a Hollywood adventure movie.
He also inspired a wonderful heartfelt story about All Blacks fandom, recorded by John Clarke aka Fred Dagg in 2009 book My
Sports Hero, compiled by Wynne
Gray.
Clarke recalled: “In Palmerston North in the winter of 1959, I sat down and wrote to an All Black.
I was 10 years old and the letter was in my best handwriting.
“The letter was to Terry Lineen, the All Black second five eight, who could float through gaps which he identified using radar.
“Terry Lineen wrote back to me. “The letter thanked me, encouraged me and thought perhaps I might be interested in the signatures of the All Blacks who played in the third test against the Lions (which we won 22-8). These were all on a separate sheet. Each player was named and each had signed next to his name.
“I still feel good about this letter. “When Fred Dagg first appeared on television in the 1970s, he got letters from kids all over New Zealand. Every kid who wrote to Fred Dagg received a reply. The reason Fred wrote back to all these kids is that Terry Lineen wrote back to me.”
What happens is that you’re tearing a player between their club and their country.
Samoa coach Steve Jackson