KEY POINTS:
I will not be rising at sparrow's tomorrow morning. I will not be banging the alarm clock to shut it up, nor will I quietly slip out of bed and into the lounge to turn on the television then make a cup of tea. I have decided. I
am resolute. I will not interrupt a decent night's sleep to see the All Blacks play England again. Why would I?
If memory serves me right, we've played the buggers twice already this year. Indeed, I forked out $55 for an incredibly bad seat to watch them play at Eden Park on a surprisingly warm night back in June. I couldn't see much, but I'm pretty sure that I've seen enough of the All Blacks playing England for one year.
Yes, if the All Blacks beat the English it will be a "grand slam", and only the third in 100 years - but, and crucially, it will also be their second grand slam in three years. This fact, in part, cuts to the heart of why I shall not be rising tomorrow morning until well after eight. It's quite simple, there is just too much rugby and it has become about as boring as being a very bored person with nothing to do on a particularly insipid Sunday while living in a town called Jaded.
Rugby is no longer a seasonal delicacy to be enjoyed, like salty, succulent Bluff oysters, for a few months a year. Instead it's a near year-long slog; the last game of the 2008 New Zealand rugby season is tomorrow morning; the 2009 season begins 11 Fridays from now. It's not only the players who need to recharge themselves after a long season, viewers and supporters need a decent spell too. And two and a half months is not enough for either players or fans. But of course there's been too much rugby for years now, and for years I've avoided burnout by ignoring the first few rounds of the Super 14, winding up for the tournament's second half, going strong through the international season, taking a good rest during the Air New Zealand Cup and then reviving myself briefly for the northern hemisphere internationals before taking the summer off. It's a strategy that's no longer working. There is little that is super about the Super 14, bar the consistency of the Crusaders, making the tournament a dreary procession of fixtures.
The pre-Tri Nations internationals seem to routinely involve under-strength opposition and rusty All Blacks, while the Tri-Nations, probably the best rugby all year, now consists of three games a piece against (cliche alert) "the old foe", which is at least one game too many against both of them.
Meanwhile the "grand slam" tours seem now to be becoming a semi-annual event, which means - all things being equal - what took 100 years to achieve (two grand slams) may well become something which happens every few years. Each season now has such a predictable - and dreary - pattern to it, it's a wonder that the All Blacks, their opposition or the punters bother to show up at the games. But the disincentives for getting up at 3am tomorrow run deeper than predictability and overkill.
Indeed, in the past few years a perfect storm - a perfect scrum, one might even say - has borne down on our national game making it not only dull to follow but also uncomfortable and depressing. First there is the arrogance. It is a worry - actually it's more like a mortifying revelation - for a New Zealander to find him or herself agreeing with Times rugby writer and arch AB baiter Stephen Jones. But increasingly I've found myself quietly agreeing with his accusations that the All Blacks management team and players hold themselves aloof from every other side with the sort of hauteur you'd expect of a 17th century French aristocrat.
Do we really want to be represented by a national side which behaves like a bunch of petulant rock star prima donnas in other people's countries? Shouldn't we leave that to the Australian cricket team? There is a another kind of predictability at play here too - other than the shape of each season - which feeds this accusation of arrogance. New Zealand is blessed to have a rugby side that wins regularly, but when they don't win - or more often, don't win well enough - the level and heat of public acrimony each and every time is frankly embarrassing.
We should save that sort of anguish for something real and something important, like the murder of yet another child. All Black supporters can be as petulant as their team, reacting to any kind of criticism, whether measured or needling, with the sulkiness and indignation of a teenager told they're not the centre of the universe. And why is it that when the All Blacks lose the big games it's because of ropey refereeing or because of an alleged deliberate food poisoning and never because the All Blacks were simply outclassed by a better side and /or played with the grace and agility of a three-legged dog?
The All Blacks and their supporters are not entitled to victory but they almost always exhibit a sense of entitlement, as if winning is a God-given right. Wouldn't it say something for our vaunted growing national maturity if AB supporters were to applaud a deserved defeat as well as a deserved win? There are other irrations which now dog the game internationally.
The IRB, for example, keeps changing bloody rules - surely a sign of a game in trouble. But the most pernicious blight on rugby, nationally and internationally, is that those who should be protecting it - players as well as administrators - appear to have been captured by the marketers and the moneymen. Many of our best no longer play here, having sold out for big contracts in the northern hemisphere well before their AB use-by date. The team playing tomorrow morning would be a different (and better) side if - and I will be frank here - greed hadn't booked a large part of the 2007 All Blacks one-way flights Up Over. What, too, does it say about New Zealand rugby that one the best players of his generation, Dan Carter, has been given a "sabbatical" - a weasel word if ever there was one - from the Super 14 next year so he can make God knows how much money on a short-term contract with French club Perpignan.
Some have argued that the Perpignan experiment may be a way of staunching the player drain. But Carter's absence will absolutely cheapen next season's Super 14 - and embolden other players to demand similar treatment. Meanwhile, the moneymen have turned the All Blacks into more than just a team.
Apparently they are ambassadors for the game too, tasked with spreading this decaying code to countries that don't give a blind stuff about rugby. What, I ask you, was the point of the Hong Kong game this month? Not the Bledisloe Cup, the All Blacks had already won it. Not the game, it wasn't up to much. It was just about money and marketing. The moneymen and marketers have pulled a more subtle and ultimately more fatal trick on the country too.
Progressively they have turned rugby's most successful side into a product. Having devalued the All Blacks into a commodity - something I suspect many of us have sensed for some time - the marketers now have to resort to scoundrel's patriotism with expensive and manipulative advertising campaigns drenched in "heartland" and pre-professional era imagery and language to try to restore what they themselves have helped steal away.
The All Blacks are now like L&P, once something we all enjoyed for itself, now a product sold to us with a fake, pitiable and dispiriting nationalism embodied by L&P's slogan "world famous in New Zealand". Am I being naive and old-fashioned? Probably. Is this a World Cup hangover I'm suffering? Possibly. But the rot - if that's what it is, hopefully it is a kind of growth - was in me well before Cardiff.
So I'll be having a sleep-in tomorrow morning. I will not watch a replay. I may, out of reflex and 30 years of commitment, turn on the midday radio news to hear the result, but that will not mean I haven't resigned as a rugby fan. I have quit. I have decamped, deserted and departed. I am, sadly, an ex-All Black supporter.