THREE KEY FACTS
- The All Blacks face Ireland in Dublin on Saturday morning
- The two sides have developed a heated rivalry over the better part of the past decade
- Ireland’s authenticity and approach to the game can see them overtake the All Blacks, on and off the field
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.
OPINION
The question, even just eight years ago, that everybody had about Ireland was ‘would they ever beat the All Blacks?’.
Now, they have done it five times, and the question is how long before they become the biggest brand in world rugby – bigger, more commercially powerful and successful than the All Blacks?
My answer is probably 10 years, certainly within 20 for the simple reason that Ireland aren’t selling a rugby team to the world, they are selling themselves.
And brand Ireland is hugely powerful. It’s simple and built on a clear sense of identity.
The Irish know who they are. They are a land of poets, authors and musicians.
A nation of story-tellers, their culture built on the endless need for craic and so there is nothing contrived or forced about the way they operate either as a team or as a fan base.
At the World Cup last year, more than 60,000 Irish fans came to France and they took over the tournament. This sea of green was like a tsunami – spilling out of pubs, into trains and stadiums and back to pubs again.
They sang and they laughed, and maybe the most memorable memory of the tournament was the fans who were still outside Stade de France a few hours after the loss to the All Blacks, doing their best River Dance impressions and not caring that the dream of winning was over.
It’s easy to be Irish. You stick on a green jersey and enjoy life. When Zombie by the Cranberries plays, you drop everything and sing it and being an Irish fan seems like it comes with all sorts of perks and attractions.
And here lies the problem for New Zealand Rugby – it’s selling a rugby team to the world, one that comes with its own highly-defined values, but its identity is distinct and different to that of New Zealand.
It’s been apparent on this tour, that not everyone appreciates or connects that the All Blacks are from New Zealand, and this is the significant downside of building a national team that doesn’t carry the name of the country it represents.
There is no wider movement or powerful sense of identity being pushed by New Zealanders to amplify the power of the All Blacks brand.
How are Kiwis presenting themselves to the world via rugby and the All Blacks? It’s hard to know, because even now, Kiwis abroad struggle to be sure who they are.
They wear an All Blacks jersey to the game, but mostly you sense the expats who were at Twickenham and the ones who will be in Dublin, don’t know how to overtly and consistently demonstrate their love for their country.
There is no unifying song, no prescribed characteristic in the same way as the Irish have an indefatigable love of life and a default ability to be self-deprecating, and certainly New Zealanders seem to invest so much of their identity in the result.
It’s unlikely that anyone has ever looked at All Blacks fans at a test match and thought that they were having the time of their lives.
There still seems to be something a little too tightly wound up about those people who follow the All Blacks.
Last week at Twickenham, there was no overt joy coming from the few who were there – just tension and angst until George Ford’s last ditch drop goal attempt sailed wide.
So in relation to the theory about future growth prospects – there are estimated to be between 50 million to 80 million people not living in Ireland who have Irish heritage and there seems a much higher probability that this diaspora can be monetised, than there is of the estimated 60 million All Blacks fans living outside of New Zealand being monetised.
The attraction of being an Irish fan is not contingent on the team being successful necessarily, whereas the All Blacks’ only route to commercialisation is to be the most successful team in the world.
The numbers don’t lie
The single greatest advantage the All Blacks have over Ireland is the longevity of their success.
The All Blacks overall success ratio is 76% – the highest, by some distance, of any tier one rugby nation.
But the question is how much relevance and importance can that historical figure carry if the present and recent past is not delivering to that benchmark?
And equally, how long do Ireland have to consistently produce a higher win ratio than the All Blacks for them to be able to make the more compelling case to sponsors and broadcasters about being considered the more successful team?
Ireland’s record over the last six years is superior to New Zealand’s. Since 2018, they have enjoyed a 74 per cent win ratio, which compares with the 73 per cent produced by the All Blacks.
If we tighten the window to the period between 2020 and now, Ireland’s success rate is 77% and New Zealand’s 70%.
A six-year span doesn’t constitute a long enough body of evidence to be talking of Ireland usurping the All Blacks as the world’s most successful team, but it’s important to look at the underlying factors which are driving success.
Ireland are operating a tight and effective financial model where they run four provincial teams, mostly on a break-even basis.
They were forecasting they would lose $14m in 2023 but the actual result was just $1.8m, which compares with the $9.8m NZR lost.
Interestingly, Ireland have played 20% fewer tests than the All Blacks since 2020 and that could be interpreted as compelling evidence that there is a flaw in the execution of New Zealand’s strategy of trying to milk every last dollar out of the national team.
Taking the All Blacks all over the world to play 14 tests in any given year doesn’t work financially, as the associated costs appear to come with both direct and indirect costs as to render the exercise moot.
And then there are the reputation risks to consider as the more the All Blacks play, the harder it becomes for them to preserve their win ratio.
Their November schedule this year was Ireland, France and Italy, but they added tests in Japan and England for commercial reasons and by playing five games in consecutive weeks, they have compounded the difficulty of the tour.
Ireland have also just agreed a tweak to their model where the four provinces have to contribute 30% of their centrally contracted players’ costs – a change designed to help viability by lessening the load on the national body.
Their system is less convoluted than New Zealand’s where the additional layer of having the NPC complicates payment structures for players and ultimately creates a financial distribution problem.
The effectiveness of Ireland’s system can be seen not just in the rise of their men’s national team, but also the rest of their rugby portfolio.
Ireland’s women’s team recently beat the Black Ferns, the men’s sevens team made the quarter-finals of the Olympics (the same as New Zealand’s), and their Under-20 team have been in two World Junior Championship finals since 2016, compared with New Zealand’s one.
Just to highlight how strong rugby is in Ireland, the recent match between provincial heavyweights Munster and Leinster had a crowd of 70,000.
Irish rise smiling
Everything about coming to Ireland has changed for the All Blacks in the past 20 years.
When I first covered a game in Dublin for the Herald in 2005, the All Blacks picked one team in the opening fixture against Wales and then made 15 changes the following week for the test against Ireland.
They scored 40 points in both, largely because Ireland was a professional team burdened with an amateur ethos, as no country embraced rugby’s old school values harder than they did.
But Ireland has shown itself to be a country with a rare ability to reinvent itself, and perhaps there is a link between their economic growth and rugby success.
Ireland was once the poor man of Europe until it dropped corporate tax rates, took European Union subsidies and ran tighter fiscal budgets to attract high tech companies and financial heavyweights to set up in Dublin.
The whole Angela’s Ashes vibe was still strong even in the early 1990s, but coming to Dublin now is to see a city with a state-of-the-art financial district, major US brand names on the sides of big buildings and a diversity of population that has come in search of opportunity.
Ireland is now the powerhouse economy New Zealand would like to be but won’t ever be until it can wean itself off primary industry.
One country is dynamically modernising, the other is unsure how to move forward and perhaps this is reflected in how differently the two teams have approached this test.
Ireland have spent most of the week in Portugal, enjoying some warm weather training. It’s a sign, maybe, of how relaxed they are, meanwhile the All Blacks have been edgy and a little closeted.
They didn’t do any media engagements for those of us here in Dublin on Sunday, and on Monday they couldn’t fix and then commit to a media window.
At 4pm when the session was supposed to start, it was pushed back to 4.15pm, and eventually, instead of the media being taken down to the side of the field at University College Dublin where the All Blacks were training, assistant coach Jason Holland, a bit like Willie Wonka, magically appeared in front of the locked gates to speak to the assembled reporters.
He came up because the All Blacks, even though the light was fading, were still training. In my experience, when the All Blacks are confident, their training is short and sharp and there is no indecision about how to structure their week of preparation.
What goes on tour
Ethan de Groot was not the first All Blacks front-rower to get himself into a bit of bother in London.
In 2013, when the Herald’s travel budgets were a little more generous than they are today, myself and my colleague Pat McKendry, found ourselves staying at the same hotel as the All Blacks in London.
The hotel in Kensington was a magnet for celebrities, and people one income bracket down from oligarchs and oil sheikhs (how we ended up there is a genuine mystery).
After the All Blacks had beaten England, the team were allowed to enjoy a few celebratory drinks, which no one did more vigorously than veteran hooker Andrew Hore.
Pat and I discovered this when we came back from dinner and were waiting for the lift. When the doors opened, a clearly worse for wear Hore was flailing around with his tie askew and a few random stains splattered over his shirt.
We asked if he was going up, to which he said no, down, and there was a brief unpleasant exchange.
A clearly sober Aaron Cruden mouthed an apology. Hore was still making a nuisance of himself later that night until captain Richie McCaw and manager Darren Shand hauled him into his bed.
Hore wasn’t disciplined, but he was made to buy Pat a coffee and apologise when we arrived in Dublin the next day.
All Blacks v Ireland, Saturday 9.10am
Live commentary on Newstalk ZB, Gold Sport and iHeartRadio.
Live match blog at nzherald.co.nz