The All Blacks could play a cross-code test against the Australia Kangaroos. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
I know we all went a bit stir-crazy in lockdown, but the idea of the All Blacks playing the Kangaroos is so weird who would believe it even if today was April Fool's Day?
It'd be great if the backroom marketing genius who came up with the concept had an answer to a few leading questions that spring to mind in less than a heartbeat.
What would you do with scrums? What's called a scrum in league is actually 12 players standing still and not pushing. If you allowed a rugby scrum the poor league guys involved would provide a lifetime of work for a squad of chiropractors.
Would you have lineouts? There are some powerful guys in league, but even Boyd Cordner, the man rated the best second rower in the NRL in 2019, would, at 1.85m, barely come up to Sam Whitelock's shoulder. Lifting in a lineout would have to reach amazing new levels of skill and elevation for the Kangaroos to ever win the ball on their own throw.
Would you have rucks? Stealing the ball if two or more defenders are involved in a tackle is illegal in league. So for the Kangaroos to adjust to the idea that at the tackle you can scrap for the ball, would need a mind shift as massive as Health Minister David Clark deciding to take some responsibility for the country's Covid-19 failings.
Or do you drop contested scrums, lineouts, and rucks, and just have a play the ball at every breakdown? That'd be the only way you'd actually have a contest, one that the Kangaroos could well win, given that they've had a lifetime of working out defensive patterns and making head on tackles.
But then it's not a hybrid game, it's actually league. So if you were selecting the All Blacks, the pack would consist of 110kg loose forwards, and so, basically, would most of the backs. In other words, it wouldn't be the All Black team as we know it, and a lot of the novelty of the game would be stripped.
The reality is that games like a Kangaroos-All Blacks match are not even on the same level as a First XV versus the netball A-team game I remember from decades ago at high school. That was funny, but we only played one code - netball. To try to mix sports, even two as superficially similar as league and rugby, is a misinformed stunt doomed to failure.
Warren Gatland knows what pressure is. After all he's coached Wales, where, it's worth remembering, some of their rugby fans are crazy.
How crazy? In 1978 at Bridgend, All Black manager Russell Thomas was surrounded by four men at the end of a game who tried to strangle him with his scarf. No-one was ever arrested. In 1989 astonished All Blacks were spat at by a kid in the street in Cardiff. The boy's parents did nothing.
Gatland was a player in that '89 All Black team, and would have known from the start of his Welsh coaching appointment in 2007 that support for the national coach in Wales is a beast that needs to be fed constant wins to make it happy.
He managed that feat with aplomb, so he won't be panicking that in the brutally short and hugely competitive cauldron that is Super Rugby Aotearoa the Chiefs are now two games for zero wins, or that the TAB now sees them as nine-to-one outsiders to take the title behind the Crusaders (paying $1.67) and the Blues ($3.30).
But it is a slump for a Chiefs side, who back in February after the first two rounds of pre-Covid Super Rugby, had a 37-29 win over the Blues, and a 25-15 victory over the Crusaders under their belt.
All of which makes the Sunday afternoon game with the Crusaders in Christchurch very close to a make or break match for the Chiefs.
So much will depend on what happens in the forwards, and that's where the odds look stacked against the men from the Tron.
Captain Sam Cane returns to the starting XV following a back problem but fellow loose forward Luke Jacobson, who just may be the unluckiest player in the country at the moment, is gone for the rest of the competition with a broken metacarpal bone, which crucially connects the fingers to the wrist.
Lock Brodie Retallick is back in New Zealand from Japan, but he knocked back the chance to play for the Chiefs. "They did approach me," he told Newstalk ZB, "but one of the reasons I wanted to stay playing in Japan was just to have a bit of time with the family with a long off-season, and to give the body a bit of a break."
Retallick would be like gold to the Chiefs if he was playing in Christchurch, because if there's one thing that makes the Crusaders favourites it's the veterans they have in the pack. Men like Whitelock (117 tests), Codie Taylor (50 tests), and Joe Moody (46 tests), provide a grizzled, street smart core for the red and blacks. Hell, the Crusaders can even have a 31-test All Black, Luke Romano, on the bench.
If Gatland can mould, in the limited time he's had since Covid, an eight that can match the Crusaders, then, as the Welsh once dubbed Graham Henry, it's Gatland who is really the Great Redeemer.
There's a lot to admire in the current Blues team, but one of the most pleasing is the dynamic play of Rieko Ioane.
Ioane has always been gifted. The great All Black wing of the 1970s, Sir Bryan Williams, saw Ioane when he was a schoolboy playing age-group rugby at Ponsonby's Cox's Creek ground. Williams once told me, "I thought, 'wow, there's a superstar in the making'."
In 2014, when Ioane was only 17, Williams got a phone call from Andy Dalton, then the CEO of the Blues.
"Andy told me he was really beating himself up over whether he should sign Rieko, who was then still at (Auckland) Grammar. The Blues had a policy that they didn't sign schoolkids, and he was reluctant to break it. I said to Andy, 'If you don't sign Rieko and his brother (Akira) you'll be regretting it for the rest of your life'."
When a 20-year-old Rieko played his first tests as a starting wing against the Lions in 2017, he looked destined to be a match-winner at the 2019 World Cup. That didn't pan out, but the revived Ioane of 2020 must be a certainty for the next All Blacks squad, whenever that may be named.
The 31-year-old will take up a second sabbatical in his NZ Rugby contract.