NZ Rugby isolated, vulnerable and wrong
When English poet John Donne wrote that No Man is an Island 400 years ago, he couldn’t possibly have foreseen 19,300km away in the Pacific there would be such determination to prove him wrong.
But New Zealand Rugby have done just that, having found themselves isolated and vulnerable without a friend in the world.
It started with Australia and South Africa but the list of organisations and territories NZR has now alienated has been expanded to include their own players’ association and the Pacific Islands en masse.
The move to island status for NZR began in July with a unilateral declaration to blow up Super Rugby.
Now they have all but completed the job with another unilateral decision to unveil next phase plans for the competition which has led to the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association saying it’s had enough of the national body’s “arrogant and dominant stance” in regard to trying to structure the professional landscape next year and beyond.
The various Pasifika syndicates who have spent the last two months bidding to enter Super Rugby are equally disaffected and bemused that NZR conducted a bid process for something it couldn’t deliver.
For something, in fact, it has no legal ability or right to deliver, because despite all the headlines and unilateral proclamations that Super Rugby is dead, all Sanzaar parties are locked into watertight, irrefutable contracts that they will be participating in a 14- team competition in 2022.
If Sanzaar had any kind of strategic nous or leadership, it would have followed Mark Twain’s lead and spent a bit of time these past few weeks reminding everyone that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
Although it may not suit NZR’s newly adopted belief that it is the owner and governor of Super Rugby, it categorically isn’t.
Agreement was reached among the Sanzaar partners that due to Covid, member nations would be free to make alternative arrangements in 2020 and 2021.
But there has been no unwinding of Sanzaar and all the commercial arrangements that are locked into it in 2022.
Rob Nichol, who heads the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association, is not alone in wondering on whose authority NZR feels it is acting in relation to the bid process to expand Super Rugby Aotearoa in 2022.
It has no legal right to see itself as the chief organiser, and so the four bidders who were told they are still in the frame for inclusion in 2022 should be aware they are, in fact, in a race to nowhere and not a race to be part of Super Rugby.
This pandemic- impacted time is an opportunity to unite and collaborate, not leverage and dominate.
It’s a time for the so- called strong to protect those who are struggling and NZR must surely see that it is complicit in keeping Rugby Australia in a place of weakness by refusing to engage in good faith terms about how the two nations can build future competition structures together.
It’s classic chicken and egg, with NZR saying Rugby Australia is too high risk as a partner because it has no broadcast deal beyond next year, yet NZR has not afforded Rugby Australia an opportunity to be part of Super Rugby and therefore they don’t have anything to take to their broadcasters to secure a deal.
NZR also aired its belief that financially, it was too big a risk to include Moana Pasifika next year.
On that basis, there is justification, but as Nichol is now advocating, no one knows the answer to that because the key questions have not been asked and the right people have not all been in the room together to thrash out the feasibility.
He accepts it may still be unsuccessful, but it will at least satisfy the various interested Pasifika parties that NZR exhausted the possibility of inclusion in 2021 and that will be the first step in the national body winning back some friends around the world it desperately needs.