Richie Mo'unga dejected after the loss. Photo / Photosport
Richie Mo'unga dejected after the loss. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
No one, it seems, is prepared to admit that it is a catastrophic blow for New Zealand Rugby that Richie Mo’unga will be leaving for Japan at the end of the year.
His decision to sign a three-year deal with Toshiba is the biggest personnel loss the national bodyhas experienced in the last two decades — maybe ever — and worryingly illustrative of the fading power of the black jersey as a retention tool.
There has so far been no appetite within NZR to admit that Mo’unga’s decision came as a terrible and unexpected blow and no one has been willing to use it as the basis to open a conversation about the existential threat Japanese clubs now pose to the viability of Super Rugby.
It has been easier for everyone to pretend that Mo’unga is just one more veteran player who, in realising that their time in New Zealand had come to a natural end, opted to see out their last few good years in Japan.
But however convenient it may be to rewrite Mo’unga’s narrative, at some stage the unpalatable truth it represents will have to be acknowledged so rugby administrators in this country can sharpen and improve the weaponry they wield in the battle to retain players.
What’s clear now is that the lure of test football is not the trump card it once was and in the wake of Mo’unga’s decision to leave, we can deduce that players no longer feel they need to be an All Black for all of their best years.
Mo’unga, at 28, has finally established himself as the All Blacks first choice No 10.
It was a battle he may have thought he was never going to win because throughout 2020 and 2021 there was no sense that All Blacks coach Ian Foster had made up his mind about his best 10.
It was Mo’unga one week, Beauden Barrett the next — a situation that only changed in the middle of last year when the former started to deliver the control and variety that the coaching team were looking for.
Beauden Barrett and Richie Mo'unga. Photo / Photosport
Mo’unga not only forged ahead of Barrett last year, he had the security of knowing that his rival, closing in on his 32nd birthday, was going to be heading offshore in 2024.
And this is why NZR should be alarmed, conscious of how seriously they need to consider amending their eligibility rules to grant certain players, or maybe even a fixed number, dispensation to play their club football in Japan but still be available to the All Blacks.
With Barrett exiting and no emerging first-five in the picture, Mo’unga must, surely, have been able to cast an eye into the future late last year and see that he had a chance to write himself into folklore.
He was staring at a possible future of committing to NZR for another four years and building himself into one of the great No 10s of all time.
Mo’unga has battled for consistency of performance in his test career to date, but there’s no denying his talent.
Yet, he weighed up what the prospect of potential entry into the All Black hall of fame would bring him against the $5m or so he’ll earn at Toshiba over three years, and decided that financial security for life is the right option for him.
A decade ago, New Zealand’s best players were hooked by that black jersey.
But we are now in a new world where the physical and mental demands of test rugby have become so high and the scrutiny so intense, that players are being burned out quicker than they used to.
Some players will still want to see if they can get through three World Cup cycles, maybe even four, but it’s more realistic to believe that the typical test career will become shorter.
Mo’unga won his first cap in 2018 and six years may become the norm — the amount of time players feel they can give to the test arena before the prospect of earning life-changing money starts to carry the greater appeal.
For the last two decades NZR, knowing they can’t compete with the salaries being offered by the likes of Toshiba and Panasonic, have kept hold of their best players by judicious use of sabbaticals and the hard-line they have held on All Blacks eligibility.
But they can’t be certain anymore that the modern player will be wedded to test football in the same way their predecessors were and while it would be obviously dangerous to make a blanket change to eligibility policy, creating a new system where a limited number of individuals could be picked each year from Japan has to be put under consideration and known as the Mo’unga Rule.
