All Blacks captain Sam Whitelock and the All Blacks. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
All Blacks captain Sam Whitelock and the All Blacks. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
There's a future world, no one quite sure when it will present itself, where people will be doing things like catching up for coffee with friends and shaking hands. Maybe even they will kiss their friends, go to the cinema and not once mention or think about Covid-19.
Everyone isitching to make it to this future world and hopefully it will take weeks rather than months to get there.
But what we don't know is what major rugby events and competitions will look like in this future world. They will be part of it. Next year, presumably, some form of normality will have gripped.
Travel bans will have lifted, self-isolation will be a forgotten term and in theory Super Rugby, and all the other professional staples will be back up and running.
The specifics, though, of what Super Rugby looks like in terms of personnel, sponsors, format and broadcasters is harder to say as so much now depends on the level of disruption experienced in 2020.
Everything depends on how much financial damage is caused to the game in the next six-to-nine months and that depends almost entirely on what happens with test football.
Super Rugby is stuffed for 2020. It can't be salvaged now. Not financially anyway as the ban on mass gatherings alone ensures that even should some new, truncated, intra-country format be hastily scrambled in the next few weeks, there isn't going to be any gate money coming in.
TJ Perenara of the All Blacks leads the Haka during The Rugby Championship and Bledisloe Cup Test match between the New Zealand All Blacks and the Wallabies. Photo / Getty Images.
It's stuffed as a competitive entity no matter how Sanzaar tries to piece it together in the next few months. Playing within each country behind closed doors is a means to keep the illusion of competition alive, but how, given the wider circumstances, can the tournament be melded so as teams from New Zealand can once again play teams from South Africa or Australia?
There won't be a true champion at the end of if and really, the rationale for continuing is to give the players a means to stay match fit and conditioned and to try to prevent the whole economic foundation from collapsing.
And to prevent collapse, there has to be some kind of clarity in the next month or so about what might happen to test football this year?
The future of Sky and by extension the future of New Zealand Rugby depends entirely on being able to stage some kind of test programme this year.
If there is no test football, it will kill Sky. The broadcaster has seen its share price to plunge to 31 cents. Some of that drop is attributable to the general carnage in this uncertain time, but some specifically relates to the market's fears that Sky will see subscribers disappear at a catastrophic rate without any content to keep them.
Sky is a content business and without content it's in trouble. Without All Blacks content it will be time to shut the door and turn off the lights at the Mount Wellington headquarters.
NZR has significant cash reserves tucked away to protect it in precisely this sort of scenario. Over the next period it will agree a rescue funding package for Super Rugby clubs, none of whom have any cash reserves and none of whom budget, in a best case scenario, to do much more than break even.
But NZR's whole business is underpinned by an estimated $70million of annual income from Sky. If that is jeopardised or lost, then NZR collapses with its broadcaster and so this is why no one can be certain about what professional rugby will look like in the future world.
However serious rugby's financial crisis was a few weeks ago, it is now critical. The sport, as we know it, is fighting for survival and is up against a world far outside its control.
No one can say whether Wales and Scotland, who are scheduled to play here in July will still come. But based on current travel restrictions, protocols and infection forecasts, it's probable they won't. And that will be about $10 million of gate revenue lost.
The Rugby Championship, which is due to kick off in August, could survive in a variant form to the one scheduled, but it could just as easily be that by then, infection rates are climbing in the Southern Hemisphere due to winter conditions and medical advice changes to ban people from playing contact sport.
Even if test matches can go ahead, will they be played behind closed doors because if they are, boom, there is another $10 million of income lost.
Maybe the All Blacks will be able to travel to Europe in November but maybe by then it will be too late – the game will be out of money and the landscape of 2021 has to be totally redrawn.
