Phil Gifford: Why All Blacks need to tell English Rugby Union to get stuffed

Ardie Savea of the All Blacks looks dejected after the teams defeat during the 2019 Bledisloe Cup test match. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

COMMENT:

Tyson Fury won his world heavyweight title from Deontay Wilder in Las Vegas. No sane person would have suggested that because Wilder was an American he should pick up all the US$7 million purse while the visiting Englishman Fury would only get his hotel bill paid.

Yet that is exactly what happens when the All Blacks play a test against England at Twickenham.

When the All Blacks go to Britain, New Zealand Rugby pays their international air fares but their expenses while in the UK, called the "landed costs", are paid by the British or Irish rugby unions.

The gate from an All Black-England test at Twickenham is around $16m. England take every cent.

There have been suggestions in the past that maybe some of that cash should be shared with New Zealand, given that the All Blacks are 50 per cent of a test match that, as an English official proudly bragged in 2018, could always be sold out 20 times over.

The sharing, caring attitude of The Rugby Football Union (as the England rugby union modestly calls itself) was perhaps articulated best in 2016 by The RFU's chief executive at the time, Ian Ritchie, to hints from New Zealand for a slice of the Twickenham pie.

"If we manage to sell out 82,000 (tickets) here, it's because of our efforts and because we've invested in the stadium. Of course they (New Zealand) would say they want more money. But there is nothing to stop them building a bigger stadium. Go and build a stadium if you want to increase your revenue growth."

No mention, of course, of the fact that Auckland, our biggest city, has a population of 1.4 million people, while 8.8 million people live in London. Size alone gives the upper hand to England when it comes to revenue raising.

Last week, in a social conversation, a former New Zealand Rugby board member was blunt about what he felt was needed to keep enough money flowing to hold All Blacks here as increasingly large sums are being offered from northern hemisphere clubs. "We need to tell (the England rugby union) to get stuffed until they agree to share some of the money. They sell out every All Black test at Twickenham, and we get nothing. In a professional sport that's ridiculous."

Beauden Barrett and Anton Lienert-Brown are clapped off the field by England players at the Rugby World Cup. Photo / Mark Mitchell.

What may make a showdown inevitable is the fact that the one playing area in which our rugby benefits enormously is that New Zealand gets all the gate money when the Lions tour here.

In 2017 that meant more than $30m for New Zealand Rugby. Basically the Lions' tour makes up the losses that are now a regular feature of the NZR balance sheet. In April last year a $1.9m loss for 2018 was announced, and the losses are going to get much, much worse.

NZR chairman Brent Impey has told me of his concerns that the Lions seem to be cutting back on the number of games they play on tour. In 2017 there were 10 matches when the Lions played here. In South Africa next year the itinerary has been reduced to eight games.

What real chance might there be if New Zealand decided to play hardball, refusing to play at Twickenham, or in Cardiff for no cash, just the honour?

The last great rugby revolution, when the game turned professional in New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia in 1995, was won by the southern hemisphere without a shot being fired.

In an Ellis Park conference room, two days before the World Cup final was due to be played, Louis Luyt, the thuggish head of South African rugby, announced a US$555 million television deal with Rupert Murdoch, and there were only disapproving squeaks from the northern hemisphere before they started paying players too.

But if the south, as in New Zealand, possibly in conjunction with Australia, does decide to rise again, it may not be such an easy ride.

An attempt at a competition revolution, led by Agustin Pichot, a man dubbed "the Brad Pitt of the boardroom", has been crushed, and Pichot's administrative career may have been blighted too.

The former Puma player looked like a breath of fresh, daring, air when he became the vice-president of World Rugby (the old International Rugby Board), and proposed a Nations Championship. If he'd had his way there would have been two groups of 12 international teams, who each year would not only play to decide officially the best team in the world, but would also have a promotion-relegation scheme to allow second tier to win promotion to the top section.

That died a quick death, quashed not so much, senior New Zealand officials say, by opposition from a northern giant like England, but by Scotland and Italy, whose places at the top table would have been threatened, and even by Ireland.

Pichot didn't give up, and was aiming to challenge World Rugby's president, former England captain, Sir Bill Beaumont, for the presidency.

Kieran Read, Sam Whitelock, Joe Moody and Beauden Barrett line up for the national anthems against England. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

That was a bold call. Beaumont is old school, a man who looks every inch the former international lock he was, a big, rumpled, wealthy owner of a family textile business in Chorley, Lancashire, who is unlikely to strike out in daring new directions. (In passing, his physique led to one of the most famous on field lines. As a topless woman, Erica Roe, ran onto the pitch at Twickenham, in 1982, Beaumont's halfback, Steve Smith, said to his captain, "Bill, there's a woman over there with your bum on her chest").

The battle in world rugby is between protectionism, led by the Six Nations, basically epitomised by Beaumont, and globalisation, where Pichot has been the leading figure.

I've never met Pichot, but in 2018 Auckland television producer Steven O'Meagher, working on his sweeping television series, "The Story Of Rugby", spent time interviewing Pichot in San Francisco.

"Almost everything about him is different from what you might expect from a world rugby official," O'Meagher told me on his return to his Epsom office. "He's personable. He's not from Europe. He wears his hair over his collar, and he comes from a marketing and advertising background. He seems to have a finger in many business in South America. If he was an Aucklander you'd think of his background as King's College, someone with money who had then worked hard."

A measure of Pichot's business acumen was that when he played rugby in France for five seasons from 2003, he didn't have an agent, but negotiated all his contracts himself.

Pichot's tilt at Beaumont's position as World Rugby president was believed to have originally been backed by Bernard Laporte, the president of the French Rugby Federation.

But it came as no surprise to many New Zealand officials who had shared a committee room with the wily Frenchmen when it was announced he would instead stand on a ticket as Beaumont's vice-president.

Political? Laporte is a politician to the tips of his manicured fingers, and not just in rugby. He was appointed France's Secretary of State for Sport in 2007 by Prime Minister Francois Fillon, currently in court in Paris on charges he arranged a fake job for his wife Penelope, for which they received $1.7m over almost a decade.

If Pichot, with his cosmopolitan rugby background, and all his considerable charm, couldn't make real inroads against the iron grip of the European nations, that perhaps it is time for New Zealand to revert to the blunderbuss approach of Louis Luyt and Co and basically say, "Give us the money or get stuffed".