All Blacks greats want changes to ‘dying’ sport
A group of former All Blacks and rugby identities is lobbying New Zealand rugby to make profound changes to the way rugby is played and run, fearing the grassroots side of the sport is sliding towards a slow death.
The group, headlined by former captains Ian Kirkpatrick, Andy Leslie, Dave Loveridge, Alex Wyllie and Stu Wilson, and including Earle Kirton, Mark ‘Cowboy’ Shaw and Allan Hewson, has held several meetings in Wellington to discuss aspects of the game they have found increasingly alarming in recent years.
In a series of conversations with the Weekend Herald over the past week, Kirkpatrick, one of the finest flankers to have played for New Zealand, said the game he loved has become “unattractive, unsafe and ridiculously gladiatorial”.
While he said he wasn’t a spokesperson for the ad hoc group that has been assembled by Wellington businessman and long-time sports identity Doug Catley, he felt compelled to talk freely about the modern game’s shortcomings in the hope it will generate discussion and, ultimately law changes.
Kirkpatrick said he broadly supported the issues raised in the United Kingdom by a group called Progressive Rugby — who are calling for fewer contact trainings and substitutes among other things — but he wanted to go a bit further and examine the way the game is played.
The 74-year-old who made the All Blacks out of Poverty Bay said the emphasis on the breakdown, the collisions and the physicality had become over the top.
“The way the midfield is cluttered up; it’s all about defence,” he said.
“It’s just a series of heavier and heavier guys running faster into each other.
“They say the game has got faster but it’s sped up going sideways, not going forwards.
“The amount of collisions in the game now is crazy.
“You have a couple of big guys commit to the breakdown to try to win that collision and then the rest fan out across the field and wait for the next one. It all revolves around the advantage line.
There’s no space.
“The game has always been physical but it’s got to a ridiculous point now and it doesn’t need to be like that.”
Kirkpatrick is anxious to avoid sounding like an old man viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. He acknowledged the game was always going to change with the advent of professionalism in 1996 but does not blame money for the game’s woes, rather the “league”-type coaching players were receiving.
He says the first five to 10 years of professional rugby were the best the game had ever seen, but now doubts whether the sport would have any room for a Christian Cullen.
Kirkpatrick doesn’t claim to have all the answers, neither does the group of explayers he sits with, but believes big rule changes are needed to move the emphasis away from the collision.
“The bottom line is the way the game is played now is not encouraging parents to let their kids play. We talk to parents and the message that comes back is, ‘Why would we put our kids through that?’ ”
Kirkpatrick worries for the safety of the modern player. He still has full mental faculty but he knows plenty of peers who don’t and says the problems around concussion and the long-term effects of head injuries are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
“That’s a big worry. We have to find a way to avoid all the collisions.”
Kirkpatrick’s anxieties about the state of the product feed into the larger concerns of Catley’s group.
Catley, who described modern rugby as a game of “invasion, not evasion”, said their major concern was the state of grassroots rugby. He said the drop-off of players between school and club was an indicator that too much emphasis had been on the professional “product” to the detriment of the sport as a whole. Hesaid he wants New Zealand Rugby to be a leader in the change but it had to be board-driven, not the sole responsibility of the administration led by the “very busy” chief executive Mark Robinson.
Catley quoted the late US president Ronald Reagan when asked what the group’s motivation was: “People in the future will ask why those with the most to lose did nothing.”
The game has always been physical but it’s got to a ridiculous point now and it doesn’t need to be like that.
Ian Kirkpatrick (left)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial plan to ship surplus coronavirus vaccines to a group of allied nations was frozen yesterday following a legal challenge to the deal, his office announced.
It was the latest twist in a saga that has raised questions at home about Netanyahu’s decision-making authority as well as his move to help far-flung nations in Africa and Latin America at a time when the neighbouring Palestinian territories are struggling to secure their own vaccine supplies.
The plan has also illustrated how at a time of global shortages, the vaccine has become an asset that can be used for diplomatic gain.
Netanyahu announced on Thursday that he had personally decided to share small quantities of surplus Israeli vaccines with allied nations.
He did not identify the countries, but an Israeli TV station said they included a number of nations that have supported Israel’s claims to the contested city of Jerusalem as its capital.
Netanyahu’s governing partner and rival, Defence Minister Benny Gantz, yesterday called for a halt in the shipments, saying Israel’s stockpile of vaccines is the property of the state. He attacked the prime minister’s go-it-alone approach and questioned Netanyahu’s claims that
there are really excess supplies when Israelis still have not been fully vaccinated.
“This is not the first time that significant defence and diplomatic decisions are being made behind the backs of the relevant bodies, while possibly damaging our national security, our foreign relations, and the rule of law,” Gantz wrote.
“This is a pattern which impinges upon our ability to manage the country soundly.”
Despite the freeze, Israel’s Army radio station reported that one delivery had already landed in Honduras.
Netanyahu, who is up for reelection on March 23, has staked his political success on Israel’s successful vaccination drive, in which about half of the country’s 9.3 million people have been inoculated in just under two months.
Netanyahu said that Israel has hundreds of thousands of surplus vaccines.
He said some extras were being shared in response to requests from allies as a mostly symbolic thank-you “in return for things we already have received”.
The revelation was striking because Israel has received widespread international condemnation for sharing only a small fraction of virusfighting shots with the Palestinians. Israeli this month shared just 2000 doses of the Moderna vaccine with the Palestinian Authority to immunise front-line medical workers.
UN officials and human rights groups say Israel is an occupying power responsible for the well-being of the Palestinians.
Israel says that under interim peace accords from the 1990s it has no such obligations.
It notes that it has vaccinated its own Arab population, including Palestinians who live in Israeliannexed east Jerusalem.
A list obtained by an Israeli TV station included a number of nations that have supported Israel’s claim to Jerusalem, including Honduras, Guatemala and the Czech Republic. African countries with close or budding relations with Israel also appeared, including Chad, Mauritania, Uganda and Kenya.