Caleb Clarke of the Blues reacts during the round 8 Super Rugby Aotearoa match between the Highlanders and the Blues at Forsyth Barr Stadium. Photo / Getty Images.
Caleb Clarke of the Blues reacts during the round 8 Super Rugby Aotearoa match between the Highlanders and the Blues at Forsyth Barr Stadium. Photo / Getty Images.
COMMENT:
With the benefit of the 20/20 vision hindsight always provides, no final for the stunningly successful Super Rugby Aotearoa is a mistake.
It's a fact that the fierceness of derby matches every weekend has almost wrecked the players. But the in house, Covid19 cobbled, competition has also seen thegreatest surge in public interest in the sport in New Zealand since the 2011 Rugby World Cup was held here. A final would have been a triumphant, packed house, closing flourish.
How stunningly popular has this 10 round Super tournament been? The game between the Crusaders and the Highlanders on Sunday in Christchurch has sold out.
Eden Park, where 39,000 tickets have already sold for the Blues match with the Crusaders in a week's time, has gone from ghost town to boomtown.
In Wellington the Hurricanes' CEO Avan Lee says "Clearly there were some pretty scary looking budgets before (the large size of the) crowds got confirmed. It's made a massive difference to us." Two of the Canes' matches have drawn more than 20,000 people.
Imagine then, if there was a final, and that final pitched the Crusaders against the Blues? Or the Crusaders against the Hurricanes?
Sevu Reece of the Crusaders. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
Some good news, at least, is that if the Crusaders beat the Highlanders on Sunday the striking Tu Kotahi Aotearoa (Stand Together New Zealand) trophy should be presented in front of the large and enthusiastic crowd the brutally hard won moment would deserve.
The not so good news, is that if the Crusaders lose on Sunday, but beat the Blues in a week's time, the trophy will be awarded as Eden Park rapidly empties.
There is a third way, which is rated as a 19 to one long shot by the TAB, and that's for the Crusaders to lose to the Highlanders and to the Blues, in which case residents of Sandringham should expect the roar from ecstatic Aucklanders at Eden Park to be like the sound that greeted Stephen Donald's successful kick in the 2011 Cup final.
First past the post in Super Rugby was decided on to give some breathing space for players and the season for Mitre 10 Cup and an international championship into the summer.
At the time it looked like a sensible idea. Our top players would need a break before they took on an international competition.
Crusaders winger George Bridge. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
Now, with South Africa a world hotspot for Covid19, it looks odds on that the best we can hope for is an extended Bledisloe Cup series, which in turn means we would have the time to play a Super final.
On the bright side, when the plan for next year's Super Rugby is hammered out, officials at New Zealand Rugby know that the appetite for Super Rugby, in danger of petering out, has been refreshed to the point where it's now voracious.
I'll be one of many in rugby genuinely sorry to hear of the death of Jim Blair, whose ideas live on every time you see a team warming up before a game by running grids to sharpen ball handling. It would be fair to say that a quantum leap in skills for our top players, forwards as well as backs, dates back to the 1980s, and Jim Blair.
A hugely likeable man, Blair himself was always amused by the fact Grizz Wyllie, the oldest school advocate of flogging teams at practice, would be the first coach to bring Blair, a man from, his words, "the sook's game, soccer", into the rugby fold.
When he first coached Canterbury in 1983 Wyllie's players were almost broken by his training runs. A rugged lock, Kerry Mitchell, would recall how "My wife had cooked a nice meal, and she was really unimpressed when I got home. She thought I'd got boozed after training. I couldn't even explain, I was so gone."
Blair once told me how Wyllie and he joined forces. Blair, then a teachers' training college physical education lecturer in Auckland, had delivered a talk at Lincoln College at an Easter, 1983, course for promising players.
Late at night at Lincoln, after a few beers, Blair was fumbling his way to a poorly lit urinal. "Suddenly the light from the door was cut off by this huge guy, who said, 'Jim, I want to talk to you.' I thought, 'God, it's Alex Wyllie.' I don't mind admitting I was scared. I'd heard about this hard man Wyllie, and here was this big figure, towering over me."
Blair soon discovered Wyllie wasn't upset or angry, but had trailed him to the men's room to ask in private if Blair would be interested in advising Wyllie and his Canterbury side.
The détente between Blair and Wyllie would open a pathway they led to Blair working with the Auckland side coached by John Hart. The huge skill set of the '87 All Blacks, dominated by Auckland and Canterbury players, owed an enormous amount to Blair, who took exercises he'd seen as a professional football player in his native Scotland and adapted them to rugby.
"At the start some people thought the grids were kids' games," said Wyllie. "They never were." Because of Jim Blair, Wyllie correctly predicted, the days "of teams at training just running round and round the bloody paddock without a ball" were over.
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A round of applause for Todd Payten, who quickly felt bad for not being open with an Australian TV interviewer this week, by not saying he had turned down an offer to coach the Warriors. Payten called back and asked to go live so he could tell the truth.
I always had a soft spot for John Mitchell, which dated back to a Todd Payten-like moment in 1991. When Mitchell was coaching the All Blacks from 2000 to 2003, he had, at best, a fractious relationship with journalists.
But in '91, when Mitchell was captaining Waikato, his behaviour after an interview for "Rugby News" magazine immediately won me to his side.
Near the end of our phone conversation he asked when the story would be printed. Not until the following week. "I think I should let you know that it's going to be announced on Monday I'm being dropped as Waikato captain. Richard Loe's going to be the captain. I wouldn't want you to be embarrassed because of the change when the interview comes out."
Not every rugby player behaves so decently to a journalist he's never even met.
