Deciphering a game plan amid the haze of summer
There’s been rugby activity while the summer sun beats down. I ventured to Massey University last weekend daubed in sunscreen to check out Manawatū Rugby’s next best, playing under kamikaze attack by a Pacific Islands Rugby XV. It represented a very summery knockabout start to Turbos coach Mike Rogers’ grand plan to lift the playing part out of the doldrums.
The green high-performance team which Hayden Triggs mustered and was led by a prop no less, Joe Gavigan, had the players who weren’t swanning with Super Rugby sides or were overseas.
While they survived on the summer sward, not so lucky was Manawatū lock Ofa Tauatevalu who dislocated a shoulder eight minutes into Moana Pasifika’s gallop against the Hurricanes the day before. Such is rugby pre-season and boney fields.
There are also hints former Southlander and Super Rugby fullback-first-five Robbie Robinson could be in the running to be the Turbos’ backs coach, which sounds promising.
Meanwhile, Tim Myers departs the Manawatū chairmanship in March, which he calls bittersweet. Now working for Vulcan Steel, he may soon be following the Queensland Reds from his next abode in Brisbane. He mused that after 10 years his exit may or may not be popular, especially after recent fraught seasons.
He will almost certainly be succeeded by his deputy, former Turbo and Palmerston North accountant Bertus Mulder, on a board which has three vacancies and needs 33% women or incur a financial uppercut.
Under the previous administration, sponsors felt neglected. Now, the new chief executive, former Turbo Doug Tietjens, has the local and national rugby credentials most hope will turn things around from the throne room at Waldegrave St.
In the meantime, Myers and Mulder have been working with “a group of very influential businesspeople” also keen to right the ship.
Joe Schmidt has also loaned them his influential weight and will continue to help where he can while he attends to the small matter of defibrillating Australian rugby. He has also spent time with coach Rogers talking coaching stuff.
Myers, and anyone else versed in basic arithmetic, knows provincial unions have run out of money and the NPC salary cap needs to be slashed by at least $200,000. The only unions who can spend $1 million on a team are Auckland, Canterbury and possibly the vintners of Hawke’s Bay.
Manawatū had budgeted for a loss from the past year of about $180,000, but after substantial haircuts there would now be only “a very small loss”, which Myers called an excellent outcome, following a $338,000 deficit the previous season.
An 11th-hour front-of-jersey sponsorship contra deal with Go Media was supposedly worth $120,000 in terms of billboard space, but the billboards didn’t sell.
Meanwhile, the Silver Lake deal is intended to deliver profit from investments around the world allied to the All Blacks while Silver Lake siphon off 7.5% of their commercial revenue.
The players’ association, let’s face it, Rob Nichol and David Kirk, wanted to block the whole deal. They didn’t like the idea of any revenue leaking from what they see as their bucket owned by the country’s paid players. A legacy fund set up to amass $60m to grow the grassroots lies empty for now. Time will tell who was right.
Nat a recognised saviour
Manawatū’s Nat Manville, 27, has received world recognition for saving rugby videotapes from an old-age end.
A week ago, he was surprised to receive a framed letter from World Rugby chairman Sir Bill Beaumont for his work digitising VHS videos for the NZ Rugby Museum.
Manville was severely injured as an 18-year-old in 2014 when playing for Awatapu College at Pahīatua. Until then, he had contemplated being a mechanic or a dairy farmer, but he’s been in a wheelchair since, without feeling from his chest down.
He remains a big rugby fan, follows the Hurricanes and Manawatū Turbos, and since 2015 has played wheelchair rugby – a sport which took him to Thailand in 2018. He doesn’t shy away from “pretty heavy contact”.
He doesn’t consider himself a computer guru, but the digitising has given him purpose and who knows, it might lead to something else. For now, he says it gives him something to do.
About 700 videos were donated to the museum and he estimates he’s three-quarters of the way through. Most are three hours long and he must watch every minute in his self-contained unit at the back of his parents’ section. He particularly enjoyed seeing clips from the 1905 All Blacks and more recent footage of the early days of women’s rugby.
His work is timely because many of the obsolete videos are growing mouldy and he’s catching them before they disintegrate.