Phil Gifford has six talking points for rugby in 2025:
A leader for our times
Having known and liked David Kirk from the time he moved to Auckland from Dunedin in 1985, I’m obviously a biased observer. But if AI was inventing a leader for New Zealand Rugby in troubledtimes there couldn’t be a better combination of experience and skills than those provided by Kirk.
A good player? Led the All Blacks to World Cup victory in 1987. Intelligent? A Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. Commercial savvy? The most successful businessman ever to serve on the NZRU board.
He’s also managed to stay hugely grounded. Hopefully, that will help him close the divide, which gets wider every year, between the elite world of professional rugby and the grassroots of the game. Sadly what was once a concern for the future of the club game, is now an issue for provincial rugby too. As a major sponsor of Auckland in the NPC noted late last year, “We’ve reached a point where you lose money staging a provincial game.”
A job that makes the bottom of a ruck look comfortable
The chair of World Rugby is now a former Wallaby, Brett Robinson. In itself, his appointment in November was a little like an early Christmas gift. World Rugby (formerly the International Rugby Board) has long felt like a club where to have any real say required you (a) to be from the Northern Hemisphere and (b) to be forever resistant to ideas from mere colonials in the Southern Hemisphere that might actually make the game more vibrant.
Robinson has an impressive background. A fearless loose forward, he was the first captain of the Brumbies in Super Rugby. Off the field he was a surgeon, who won a scholarship to Oxford University to do a PhD in clinical orthopaedics.
He’ll need all his on-field steeliness, and obvious intelligence, to steer the game away from the relentless smash and bash that’s been the unexpected consequence of large-scale tactical substitutions. I’m clinging to the hope that Robinson being an Aussie, and therefore knowing that in his native country rugby is forever under threat, he’ll fight relentlessly to make the game more attractive to spectators. If he can help rugby be a more open, running sport, with less mauling and more daring, it’ll be the call of the decade.
Dr Brett Robinson. Photo / Getty Images
Seizing the day
There were flashes of brilliance from the All Blacks last year. The challenge for coach Scott Robertson and his men now is to find and hold the levels they reached in their best performance of 2024, the 23-13 defeat of Ireland in Dublin.
A major element in that victory was a man-of-the-match effort from Damian McKenzie at first-five. At the time I suggested that “at 29, McKenzie has come of age as an international first-five”. For the sake of the All Blacks I hope that proves to be the case this year.
Damian McKenzie against France. Photo / Photosport
Can the Sevens stars do it again?
These are uneasy times for the Black Ferns. When they won the World Cup here in 2022, their daring play, genuine decency and warmth, and larger-than-life personalities, made them the most well-liked New Zealand team, in any sport, there’s been in the past half-century.
The triumphs of ‘22 emerged from chaos. In a frantic couple of weeks just six months before the Women’s Rugby World Cup kicked off, the bulk of the Ferns’ coaching staff resigned, and Wayne Smith, who had agreed to help out as an advisor, was suddenly the head coach.
Smith’s elevation, along with Sir Graham Henry and Stu Cron joining the coaching group, proved to be strokes of genius.
But there is no group of great coaches ready to step in before the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup starts on August 23 in England.
So is all hope of defending the Cup lost? No. Despite losses last year to England, Ireland, and Canada, the Ferns in ‘25 will hopefully benefit, just as they did in ‘22, from an injection of expertise, speed, and confidence provided by players from the brilliant New Zealand women’s sevens side. Three years ago, sevens players like Sarah Hirini, Ruby Tui and Portia Woodman gave the Ferns 15s side the cutting edge they needed. Fingers crossed history might repeat itself this year.
Can the Black Ferns defend their crown? Photo / Photosport
Mark that date
It what feels very much like a throwback to the days when the word “Springboks” sent a shiver down a Kiwi rugby fan’s backbone, Saturday, September 6 at Eden Park, when the All Blacks face South Africa, looms as the biggest game in New Zealand this year.
Combine a sold-out Eden Park, in Grant Nisbett’s words “the best rugby arena in New Zealand by quite some distance”, the Boks ranked No.1 in the world, and the All Blacks on a 50-match winning streak at the ground, and, for a night at least, rugby should hold the hearts and minds of even fairweather fans.
The Springboks have not played at Eden Park since 2013. Photo / Getty Images
He is the greatest
Any doubts that French halfback Antoine Dupont is currently the best player in the game were surely wiped away by his opening game in Six Nations, as France wiped out Wales, 43-0, in Paris.
The once-in-a-generation stars, like Dan Carter and Richie McCaw, almost play a different sport to everyone else on the field. Dupont seems to have so much time he can appear to stop still and have a look around to consider his next option. The trick is that nobody in the opposing team is able to lay a hand on him while he’s making a decision. The last time we saw that astonishing level of skill was in 2005, when Dan Carter mesmerised the touring Lions.
