The national game has never been in bigger trouble as Dame Patsy Reddy and NZR botch an independent review; Rassie Erasmus’s X-rated rant at world champion Springboks; celebrating the triumph of a Kiwi women’s basketball league; and how a tech-challenged AFL player broke the unwritten code of “what goes on
Sports Insider: New Zealand Rugby’s civil war breaks out; Dame Patsy’s magic illusion trick that David Pilkington isn’t falling for
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NZR chair Dame Patsy Reddy, basketballer Caitlyn Clark and surfer Stephanie Gilmore. Photos / Photosport, Getty Images
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Yes, dear reader.
And that alone should tell you the most important thing you need to know as we all attempt to decipher what the hell to make of Gregor Paul’s bombshell revelations in the Herald in the latest twist to rugby’s bitter governance war.
Rugby in New Zealand is still at war with itself. At best, the feud has been simmering quietly since the Silver Lake square-off in 2021.
In reality, the lid has been boiling and threatening to blow off for six months or more as New Zealand Rugby (NZR) grappled with how to deal with the independent governance review forced upon it by its national players association due to its botched Silver Lake strategy.
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Dame Patsy Reddy and the board she chairs blew that lid skyward like a wayward rocket last week when the board turned the 134-page Pilkington Report into yet another expensive door-stopper.
It should not be surprising that the New Zealand Rugby Players Association (NZRPA) has responded with guns blazing, including demands the entire NZR board resign immediately.
We’ll get to who’s to blame for what in a moment - but what’s the big picture here?
Simple but frightening. Our national game is in serious trouble.
Our rugby eco-system - for more than a century the pride and envy of international rugby greatness - is now demonstrably broken.
It is hopelessly dysfunctional.
There are some important calls coming up in the next few months that will come to define whether rugby has any chance of retaining its privileged and eminent status in our little country.
So what are we to make of this latest mess?
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Here’s Sports Insider’s take...
‘Staggering’ Self-interest and Preservation: How New Zealand Rugby sabotaged the Pilkington Report.
Last year, I worked with a smart bunch of people from BusinessDesk to produce a seven-part podcast on New Zealand Rugby’s deal with Silver Lake, titled Pieces of Silver.
NZR’s behaviour during the mishandled negotiation with the Americans staggered me, most notably a covert attempt to reduce the percentage of player-generated revenue paid to players.
I could understand the NZRPA’s distrust of NZR motives. It was also why securing the independent governance review was so important to it. David Kirk, Rob Nichol and company could see the NZR board and some members of the senior management team weren’t up to it.
It wasn’t just the Silver Lake drama. The board’s incompetence was also further laid bare in 2022 over its handling of the Ian Foster-Scott Robertson All Blacks coaching saga.
The problem for NZR’s current board is that the panel’s chair David Pilkington and his fellow panellists, including former All Blacks captain Graham Mourie, did too good a job on their report to be ignored.
Its two core recommendations of a nine-person independent board, appointed by an independent panel, and the creation of a Stakeholders Council were sound in principle, even if the finer detail needed to be argued out.
But that’s exactly what NZR has done. Only it has turned the fine-detail conversation into a dizzyingly long and complicated game of semantics and illusion.
All this after agreeing publicly to adhere to the recommendations.
I don’t know what’s worse: the lack of leadership shown in delivering an outcome the board supposedly agreed with, or last week’s audacious attempt to hoodwink the rugby public that it had actually carried out the governance change called for.
The smoke and mirrors around the union’s PR was worthy of a Penn & Teller show.
But it has come unstuck with the players’ association’s fury driving a sustained and concerted fightback including a counter-proposal for a transition towards full implementation of the recommendations by 2025, which makes a lot of sense.
Dame Patsy’s Pilkington problem
The other big problem for NZR is that the statement issued by the NZRPA claims Pilkington does not support Reddy’s watered-down counter-proposal either.
Pilkington has not spoken publicly about NZR’s backflip but it’s an educated guess that he wasn’t happy given his and his panel’s endorsement of the NZRPA’s counter-proposal contained in its material.
NZR has been aided and abetted by a cabal of provincial unions (PUs) driven by self-interest and preservation.
Along with NZR directors who didn’t want to stand down, they have conflated supposed rugby IQ and commitment to the community game with competence and made spurious claims of being the only ones who understand how rugby really works in New Zealand.
How can we be cast aside, they have howled. We are the master builders, they even dared to tell us. You don’t throw out world-class licensed builders and replace them with a group where, if you’re lucky, three of them might have helped build a deck in the past.
Let’s stick with the metaphor then, shall we?
Your track record hardly suggests you’re master builders. In fact, you’ve mostly presided over a leaky home crisis of your own making.
A quick Google search of “financially struggling provincial unions” reveals a chorus call of PUs going off cap-in-hand to the national union (usually after over-spending on their NPC squad) for a bail-out including Wellington, Manawatū, Otago, Southland, North Harbour, Tasman and others.
I’m unashamedly in the players’ camp on this one. For the good of rugby, the entire board has to go.
SportsWatch: Rassie Erasmus’ X-rated Bok rant
On a lighter note, they should have called it “Chasing the F***ing Sun”.
Two of the five episodes in the documentary Chasing the Sun series made by South African broadcaster SuperSport in conjunction with South African Rugby on the Springboks’ Rugby World Cup (RWC) victory last year have dropped.
Watching the Boks dine out on back-to-back RWC triumphs isn’t the most appetising temptation for Kiwi viewers but if you want an insight into how the Boks psyche works - and the weird world of their Machiavellian coaching maestro Rassie Erasmus - it’s worth a look.
I still can’t work out if Erasmus is a genius - or a looney tune. There’s more F-bombs out of his mouth in the first episode alone than an entire UFC troupe raise on Fight Night.
In the opening episode, he tears strips off his team at halftime as the Boks trail England in the semifinals.
“You gave the f***ing penalty away. And you promised you won’t,” he screams at his players. “You promised you were going to scrum there. You promised to play out your last f***ing game as a group together. But you lied. You’re a f***ing liar!”
Predictably - in South Africa - the outburst is being viewed as yet another example of the brilliance of Erasmus, seemingly motivating his team to perform spectacularly in the second half and secure a one-point victory over the Poms.
Maybe, but I am unconvinced. I’m surprised some leading coaches still revert to this type of prehistoric tactic and perhaps it says more about the South African players themselves than Erasmus.
But, then again, the William Webb Ellis trophy resides in Johannesburg and not Wellington, so what do I know?
If you’re interested, Kiwis can access the series via Showmax.com.
Kiwi women’s basketball feat should be celebrated
The significance of today’s ground-breaking announcement that women playing in New Zealand’s National Basketball League competitions will earn more than their male counterparts cannot be understated.
If anything, it hopefully persuades the Kiwi redneck element who have been venting on social media for several years now to climb back under the rocks from which they emerged.
I’m over the legion of chauvinistic (and typically anonymous) comments left on brain-dead social media platforms criticising New Zealand Rugby and other sporting bodies for increasing funding of female sports.
The howling into the wind of wokeness accusations and bending a PC knee all ends with the same taunt... women shouldn’t earn the same money as men because they can’t generate the same commercial value.
Well, how’s that view looking now, Sunshine?
Last week’s Sports Insider column commented on how Australia’s male national sporting teams can only look upon the Matildas women’s football team with awe and envy (the Matildas have sold out 13 straight home games and are now officially the most valuable sporting brand in Australia).
The phenomenon is global.
This week, American viewers have been going bananas on “March Madness”, the men’s and women’s annual national college basketball finals. But it is the women’s tournament - and the sport’s new phenom Caitlin Clark - that is captivating stronger interest.
TV viewership figures, global media interest, social commentary and the now-accepted Bitcoin of social media - total of number of memes created and shared - is through the roof while Clark is emerging as a bona fide international sporting superstar.
This tweet, from CNBC’s Jessica Golden, captures the mood shift perfectly:
New Zealand’s professional women’s basketball league, Tauihi Basketball Aotearoa, has achieved a pioneering breakthrough with the support of a committed commercial and broadcast partner in Sky TV and street smarts of its “fandom” expert Justin Nelson.
Can any other team sports in New Zealand played by male and female athletes match what women’s basketball has done and make it work?
I don’t know. But today’s announcement offers hope and optimism.
WhatsApp goes on tour
It wasn’t a happy Easter for the Brisbane Lions’ communications staff.
The Queensland AFL club was busy mopping up a mess made by its players when details of a messy off-season trip to the United States were revealed after a WhatsApp group’s messages were inadvertently synced by one player’s iCloud via his phone.
Upon discovering them, the player’s partner shared the group messages with other Wags and it’s fair to say all hell broke loose.
The end result had one partner leaving her boyfriend, other relationships and marriages looking very shaky and the club brass denying a rift among players has now broken out.
Adding insult to injury, the Lions, who made last year’s grand final against Collingwood, were well beaten on the weekend and are 0-3 for the season.
Oh dear.
Team of the Week
The Tasmania Jackjumpers: The quaintly named Hobart-based team are the new Australian NBL champions, beating Melbourne United in the best-of-five grand final series and celebrating on-court with cigars, ice showers and bare chests. Go you good things!
Stephanie Gilmore: The eight-times women’s world champ is taking a sabbatical from the World Tour after signing a A$6 million ($6.65m), eight-year deal with Kiwi-owned Rip Curl to travel the world and be videoed surfing perfect waves without having to compete. The 37-year-old Aussie’s first targets? Mozambique, Iceland and Ireland.
Wrexham FC: Won an Easter crunch game over league leaders Mansfield Town 2-0 to take a giant step towards back-to-back promotions, this time to League One in England. Perfect fodder for Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and their popular Welcome to Wrexham docuseries on Disney+. Season 3 starts on May 3 here.
Hurricanes and Kini Naholo: The kid brother of former All Black Waisake Naholo is looking damn impressive in a damn impressive Hurricanes outfit. Does a black jersey await the blockbusting winger? And will Cam Roigard’s unfortunate knee injury curtail the Canes’ impressive momentum?
Wellingtonians: Top of Super Rugby Pacific, the Phoenix men leading the A-League and the Saints on top of the National Basketball League. Does it get any better if you’re from the capital?
