Why rival fans envy, but not hate the Crusaders
OPINION: Scott Robertson might believe the public ‘‘genuinely dislike’’ the Crusaders - but don’t confuse sporting envy with ‘‘hate’’.
The Crusaders – with 12 Super Rugby titles since 1998 – are no different to Manchester United, the New York Yankees, Bayern Munich and Juventus, or the Auckland rugby team in its heyday.
Teams that dominate competitions and enjoy sustained success engender envy, even jealousy, among fans of teams with empty trophy cabinets.
But it was telling that Robertson, after his side beat the Chiefs in the Super Rugby Aotearoa final on Saturday, used the word ‘dislike’ rather than ‘hate’ when he issued his plea for the Crusaders’ record to be respected.
Remember the eight-year-old kid who held up the ’I Hate You, Auckland’ sign at Lancaster Park in 1997 when the Blues were at the peak of their powers?
That boy – Dean Anderson – had a pretty good take on the word ‘hate’ when he grew up to be a man. Interviewed by Stuff in 2013 – when he was 24 – Anderson said: ‘‘Now I can see how people would get quite wound up about it, but at the time – being an 8-year-old kid – I hated brussel sprouts, and I hated peas.
‘‘It [hate] was just a word that you chucked around for anything. It wasn’t a ‘set-fire-to-Aucklanders’ type thing.’’
Nor are most rational rugby fans today planning pyrotechnics. We have had no reports of smouldering effigies clad in red and black. New Zealand’s sporting rivalry doesn’t approximate the antipathy and irrationality that taints football in Europe and South America where children are brought up to loathe supporters of rival teams.
Granted, the gloating of a minority of myopic Crusaders fans can grate. Witness the one-eyed baying in the Addington stadium stands when referee Ben O’Keeffe correctly sin-binned two Crusaders on Saturday night. Such blatant partisanship even ticks off Cantabrians with full ocular range.
The Crusaders do not cheat any more than any other team in a sport that thrives on the dark arts of the breakdown.
Some punters do, however, get toey about the Crusaders ‘‘poaching’’ players.
Yes, Scott Robertson himself was a ‘‘blow-in’’ from the beaches of the Bay of Plenty, and other legendary Crusaders – Norm Maxwell, Kieran Read, Sam Whitelock and Codie Taylor – were also schooled in the North Island.
Yet plenty of big names – Andrew Mehrtens, Dan Carter, Matt Todd and Will Jordan – were born or raised between the franchise’s borders. Don’t forget too, as much it might irk Highlanders clansfolk, Richie McCaw’s home farm was on the Canterbury side of the Hakataramea River.
Besides, success breeds success in any industry. Players want to go where they’ve got a chance of winning. The Canterbury rugby academy is renowned for rolling out ready-made professional rugby players, (not all of them Crusaders).
Don’t forget Chiefs stars Damian McKenzie, Anton Lienert-Brown and Brodie Retallick all went to school in Christchurch, and the Blues are now coached by Leon MacDonald, a star Crusader in his day.
Rugby still clings to a long-gone tradition that players owe lifelong fealty to their birthplace. It’s now rare for professional sports teams to boast big numbers of homegrown players. Striker and child poverty campaigner Marcus Rashford is Manchester United’s only Manchester-born regular. None of Kiwi centre Steven Adams’ New Orleans Pelicans teammates hail from Louisiana.
There’s another reason why rivalry in rugby stops short of genuine ‘hate’.
It’s hard to ‘‘hate’’ Crusaders such as Carter, McCaw, Mo’unga and Whitelock when they also star for the All Blacks.
Some southerners never forgave Canterbury-born McCaw for choosing red-and-black over blue-and-gold after leaving Otago Boy’s High School. Yet the same cohort baying ‘‘get that bleep-bleep McCaw onside, ref’’ at Super Rugby level, were saluting his filching skills in a test match. It may seem an aeon ago that anything other than red-and-black ribbons were affixed to the Super Rugby trophy, but there’s one consolation for longsuffering Blues supporters (18 years without a title, but who’s counting?): The Crusaders still have a way to go to match Auckland’s eight-year 61-defence Ranfurly Shield tenure and six NPC titles between 1985 and 1993.
Nor are Robertson’s mob in the same league as some football teams when it comes to title hogging.
Plenty of German football folk despise Bayern Munich’s mortgage on Bundesliga silverware after 30 titles – the last nine in a row. Juventus are equally imperious in Italy – nine Serie A titles in succession to take their tally to 36.
No club other than Rangers and Celtic have won the Scottish Premiership for 36 years. Little wonder there is now a Not The Old Firm.com website catering for people sick of the Glasgow duopoly’s dominance and the sectarianism of Old Firm fans. It’s also human nature for sporting fans to enjoy teams being toppled from their pedestals.
The Crusaders’ bubble shows no sign of bursting – thanks in part to its academy with its all-pervasive tentacles.
But, maybe, there’s some subtle psychology behind coach Robertson’s lament that people ‘‘immensely dislike’’ the Crusaders. The ‘‘everyone hates us’’ narrative has served to stop many a successful team from losing focus and drifting into complacency.
Just after playing the ‘‘dislike’’ card, Robertson asserted his players had to ‘‘stay hungry for so long and turn up every day’’ and he warned, ahead of the Super Rugby trans-Tasman competition: ‘‘it’s only half a season done’’.