Someone must fall on sword
Suits should be culpable for the massive about-face in Super Rugby strategy and not hiding behind reviews
NGregor Paul opinion
ew Zealand Rugby needs a purge. The game here can’t expect to move forward with fans, players, coaches and media on board if no one is held culpable for the massive about-face in Super Rugby strategy.
Someone in power needs to fall on their sword, or be pushed if necessary, to prove that executives can’t survive by incessantly commissioning reviews to cover up their poor decision-making.
The time has come for New Zealand’s executives to live on the same knife-edge as players and coaches.
A player can miss a kick for touch in a major test and pay for it with his test career. Ask Stephen Donald about that one.
A coach is only ever one poor campaign from termination and yet the executive team which has destroyed Super Rugby seems to believe they can all survive if they commission a review, five years too late, to try to fix it.
It would be grotesquely cynical and self-serving for anyone within the halls of power to blame Covid-19 for killing Super Rugby.
No one should be allowed to hide behind the pandemic and say it alone damaged the sustainability of Super Rugby — that the consequences of its arrival suddenly rendered a crossborder competition played across four continents and 11 time zones suddenly non-viable.
The competition started cracking in 2011 when the ill-fated, convoluted conference system was first introduced, and then broke in 2016 when it expanded to 18 teams.
Media who suggested the concept was flawed, doomed even, would often receive irate phone calls from NZR executives accusing them of sabotaging Super Rugby. Of knowing nothing about the economics of the professional game and claiming that negative coverage was the reason crowds were disappearing and interest dwindling.
When the Herald published an editorial in 2016 suggesting a reduction of teams would have given the competition a viable future and that a a greater local focus would more likely engage fans and players, NZR chief executive at the time, Steve Tew, responded by saying: “We can sit in New Zealand and play ourselves but that won’t last long.”
Turns out Tew, and consultancy group Accenture, who were paid millions to come up with a global expansion strategy for Super Rugby, were horribly wrong.
Expansion brought Rugby
Australia to the brink of insolvency. It left South Africa Rugby with a major financial hole and had it not been for the 2017 British and Irish Lions tour, New Zealand, too, would have been on the edge of financial collapse.
Tew has gone but others who backed this expansion remain. NZR’s board signed off on the plans to expand and they can’t all now distance themselves from their past.
Nor can they say they have acted in time to redeem the situation. NZR agreed, just last year, to five more years of Super Rugby. They had the chance to be bold and visionary, to see what everyone else could — that South Africa and Argentina had to be cut loose.
Across the Tasman, Raelene Castle was brave enough to see that she would drag Rugby Australia under if she stayed as chief executive.
New Zealand now needs some similarly selfless acts among its executives to serve as an admission of culpability that they were wrong about Super Rugby expansion.