Provinces want trickle-up to become trickle-down

By CHRIS LAIDLAW

The NZRFU, with the usual fanfare, has had its annual jamboree and, as expected, all the attention was focused on personalities rather than issues.

Human nature being what it is, the prospect of a gladiatorial contest between more pretenders than there are positions is irresistible.

All the customary concerns were aired: the terrible possibility of too many Aucklanders being elected; the even worse prospect of no Aucklanders getting on; too many South Islanders; the conspicuous absence of Maori or Pacific Islanders; no women anywhere in sight.

And so we got a new administration responsible for running the business, with a shuffle here and a sacrificial gesture there - notably the axing of Richie Guy, whose basic wisdom and rugby intelligence may be missed a lot more than some of his detractors imagine. That's politics.

But what of the issues? Everybody at that meeting will have been only too aware of the mood of simmering uneasiness throughout the rugby community.

There is a widespread feeling that the time has come to stop congratulating ourselves at getting the professional system more or less up and running, and begin to face the side-effects with some real authority.

Chairman Murray McCaw issued a rallying call to everyone to accept that full commercialism of the game is here, whether we like it or not, and we had better get used to it.

Most people out there in the provinces would happily get used to it if they could be assured that it would bring some stability to their local operation.

They want the trickle-up turned much more decisively into trickle-down.

They want a support system from the top to the bottom that weaves the professional into the amateur and enables each to feed the other.

They want a system where players are retained in the smaller provincial areas by direct incentives funded from commercial profits.

They want help to ensure that club rugby survives.

They know that a parting of the ways between clubs and All Blacks is inevitable, but they want a signal from the NZRFU that the club season can be made into the centrepiece of local competition rather than just a little add-on crammed into the first part of the season.

Some of the more creative minds want to see a more definite regionalisation of rugby, with the Super 12 franchises becoming an over-arching body responsible for promoting the game at all levels within that region rather than just the professional layer.

At the moment the franchises are neither fish nor fowl. They have to try to make a success of the Super 12 team without having full authority for the employment of the coaches or players.

Until now they have, in effect, been little more than event managers rather than the facilitators of the game locally.

They are, in theory, the property of the local provincial unions, but in practice they have been the creatures of the NZRFU.

The time has arrived for New Zealand rugby to take the next step up and to create a truly devolved system that maximises the capacity of these regional entities.

It needs to devolve both authority and funding to these bodies to enable them to inject energy into the languishing provincial corpus; to breathe some life into coaching at all levels; to promote academies and schoolboy competitions and to provide administrative support to unions who simply cannot cope any more.

Only in this way will we ensure that the benefits of the professional game are invested in the provinces.

A few tentative steps have been taken in this direction. The new board now needs to make it happen.