Seeing the North Stand at Eden Park empty at provincial games should be enough to persuade anyone who cares for rugby that the game has problems.
While far too much of the New Zealand Rugby governance review involves almost unreadable corporate speak, if you wade through thereview several times, many home truths and good suggestions emerge. Here are seven notable points.
The biggest takeaway is that if the review’s ideas are adopted, current board members may be shown the door. Likewise, the power of provincial unions would decrease. Would being shown it’s for the good of the game be enough to persuade those who will be sidelined?
Listen to Bob Dylan
“The amateur,” Dylan once said, “is influenced. The professional steals.” It’s clear the management model the review panel really admires is The Australian Football League.
The suggestions made for changing the structure of how rugby is run in this country has echoes of the way the AFL has a governing body that isn’t, in the words of the NZR review, “looking over its shoulder” the way NZR does with our provincial unions.
The comforting news? The AFL is successful in almost every way, from having massive, 100,000 people plus crowds for big games, to huge participation numbers.
Who judges the judges?
Without going into exhaustive detail, the process for having more competent, less parochial management, a la the ARL, is carefully detailed in the review. There are checks and balances throughout, with the aim emerging clearly: A better-quality boardroom.
NZ Rugby CEO Mark Robinson. Photo / Elias Rodriguez, www.photosport.nz
Having women on the board is not tokenism
The idea that having more women in rugby boardrooms is some sort of politically correct nonsense is an unfortunate hangover from the days when most post-match speeches began with a thank you to “the ladies in the kitchen”.
That knuckle-dragging attitude has meant, highly qualified women told the review panel, that to this day “women have zero chance of getting onto the NZR board through the current routes, so in most cases they don’t bother [to stand]”.
The numbers of volunteers who run New Zealand’s clubs, surely the bedrock of the game here, show that while 2254 are men, 2243 are women.
There won’t be a high standard of governance at provincial board level, says the review, until, “at a minimum”, there are more women around the board table.
If you want a Three Waters co-governance argument in rugby, try suggesting to old-school blazer wearers that as well as women there should be more Māori and Pacific Island people in management.
For those who bridle at the very suggestion, the review notes that of New Zealand’s playing population 27 per cent of all players are Māori, and 16 per cent (50 per cent in high-performance rugby) are Pasifika. How can you argue those players don’t deserve a louder voice at the national table?
Money’s too tight not to mention
There are plenty of sobering details, but one of the most staggering is the review panel saying an NPC game costs $200,000 to stage, in front of an average audience of 2000 people. No wonder they want people with fresh ideas.
At rugby’s HQ they’re not fond of the provinces either
Forty years ago it was suggested to me by a Northland All Black that provincial unions needed to take a leaf from the Viet Cong to deal with “those pricks in Wellington”. I can’t remember what the perceived outrage by the New Zealand Rugby Union at the time was, but it’s clear relations between New Zealand Rugby and the unions aren’t much better now.
It’s far from one-way traffic. The review says the “conventional wisdom within NZR [is] that the unions cannot be trusted with sensitive information”. A provincial union official suggested that NZR “should just give us the money and leave us alone”.
