ABs camps not so Super
NZ Rugby is set to pull players out of their franchises again - and it’s a risk.
They’ve slipped under the radar so far, with no mention of them when the Super Rugby 2018 season was launched, but four All Black training camps will be a scattered throughout the early rounds of Super Rugby this year.
It’ll be the first time since the infamous experiment of 2007 that Super Rugby coaches here will have players missing on All Black training duty while the Super season is on.
Usually the All Blacks go into camp for a week at the start of the June international window, when Super Rugby stops, as it will this year for New Zealand teams from Saturday, June 2, to Friday June 29.
During that time the All Blacks will play three tests with France. Year after year it’s shown that the time spent together in June produces great results, and helps smooth the way for newcomers to learn the way the All Blacks work.
Super coaches were told of this year’s extra camps by New Zealand Rugby’s high performance manager, Don Tricker, before he left to join the San Diego Padres before Christmas.
Of the four camps, two will be largely devoted to skills, and there’ll be two more general three day camps, that would see players back with their Super teams before the weekend, but probably only in time for a captain’s run, missing the serious build-up during the week.
Don’t expect public outrage from Super Rugby coaches. They didn’t get to be in charge of the best franchise teams in the southern hemisphere, probably the world, by being stupid. And if they have ambitions to advance as coaches in New Zealand complaining about losing their best players while they’re trying to knit a winning team together would be stupid.
Privately they may have stronger thoughts. The fact is the balancing act between Super Rugby teams and the All Blacks has always been about as easy as dancing on a tight rope.
There is an obvious, insoluble problem. Super Rugby coaches want players to be in hot form from February, and the All Blacks want them still at 100 per cent in late November. No other full contact sport expects players to endure a nine-month, entirely high pressure, season. In league the NRL season runs for seven months. In the states the NFL regular season lasts four months.
The huge problem of how to fairly weigh the importance of Super Rugby against making sure the All Blacks stay on top reached an unfortunate apex in the World Cup year of 2007.
Then 24 of our best players missed the first two months of Super Rugby, to do nothing but train. On paper it worked. On average the players were 10 per cent stronger, and 92 per cent had their best speed results ever.
In reality it was a disaster. Back in Super Rugby, against match hardened opponents, many of the 24 suffered injuries. And the All Blacks were knocked out of the World Cup in the quarter-final with France in October.
One of the men who compiled the report for the NZRU on why things went so hopelessly wrong was Tricker, then working for Sport and Recreation New Zealand, alongside lawyer Mike Heron.
Their report gives a big hint as to why the ‘18 camps are being held this year, and not next year, before the World Cup in Japan.
The 12-week conditioning programme (it started a month before Super Rugby did) said Heron and Tricker, was the only key part of the 2007 campaign plan ‘‘that was not tested’’. Given that the approach was new ‘‘the risks to performance were not adequately assessed’’. In other words they should have trialled the system in 2006.
Let’s be fair. What’s going to happen this year looks like a tiny trickling backyard stream, compared to the raging Mississippi in flood that was ‘07.
If there are benefits or downsides to the ‘18 experiment for the All Blacks, the effects, for better or worse, will be known a year out from the 2019 World Cup.
A bigger concern is that the experiment in 2007 was also a calamity for Super Rugby. Fans aren’t fools. For two months in ‘07 New Zealand had second string Super teams. Viewing figures on Sky plummeted 29 per cent. In the key area for rugby on television, the number of males aged 25 to 54 years watching dropped from an average for 101,700 for the 10 most popular games in 2006, to 68,800 in 2007. The losses have never been fully regained.
To be blunt, this year it would pay New Zealand Rugby to run what amounted to a private auction system. If a Super coach is desperately keen to have a couple of his best players available for the week of a special game or two, especially for the home derbies, which by a mile are what keeps Super Rugby alive here, make every effort to let him have them.
The All Blacks, New Zealand Rugby has made it clear for some years, are the first concern.
But professional rugby, like it or not, is also show business, and if too many stars are missing from Super Rugby, the result won’t be pretty.
It'll be the first time since the infamous experiment of 2007 that Super Rugby coaches here will have players missing on All Black training duty while the Super season is on.