Patrick McKendry: Super Rugby squad announcements a damp squib

Conrad Smith was the only All Black to front at today's announcements of New Zealand's Super 15 rugby squads. Photo / Paul Taylor

It's Guy Fawkes night on Saturday and emergency services around the country will be ecstatic if the traditionally explosive affair passes with the sort of whimper that today's announcement of the five New Zealand Super Rugby franchise squads represented.

As damp squibs go, this one couldn't light a match.

Sure, the announcement of the squads came hard on the heels of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. That would have been a hard act to follow. The All Blacks players are also on leave - and they deserve the rest.

But surely the New Zealand Rugby Union could have created a little more of a fuss around marking the start of their flagship professional rugby competition for 2012 rather than let the franchises do their own thing, with varying degrees of success. Besides, Conrad Smith appeared at the Hurricanes launch - the only All Black to front.

For the past two years the NZRU have organised a combined squad naming with the five franchises, flying head coaches and players to Auckland for an event which officially marked the milestone.

Today two head coaches, Dave Rennie from the Chiefs and Pat Lam from the Blues, weren't even in the country, having travelled to Argentina yesterday for a "coaching course".

Although Lam was absent, the Blues put on the best show, providing five players, Gareth Anscombe, Rudi Wulf, Luke Braid, Charlie Faumuina and Alby Mathewson, plus Bryce Woodward to the media at a launch which also included sponsors at the BNZ building in downtown Auckland. They even went to the trouble of providing "vision" for TV and photographers - a scrum hit machine which not surprisingly Faumuina recorded the best result in.

The Hurricanes provided coaches Mark Hammett and Alama Ieremia and players Smith, Brad Shields and TJ Parenara in downtown Wellington.

The Crusaders put up their three coaches Todd Blackadder, Daryl Gibson and Dave Hewett at a suburban cafe in Christchurch. No players were there, but the three coaches were also available on a phone conference to national media in the afternoon.

The Chiefs did nothing, a spokeswoman saying that Rennie was out of the country and the squad held few surprises following the announcement of Sonny Bill Williams' signing earlier in the week.

The Highlanders' squad held the biggest surprise, the inclusion of England international James Haskell. The loose forward is still to arrive in Dunedin from Japan where he has just finished with the Ricoh Black Rams so the Highlanders couldn't capitalise on the coup by parading him before the media. Instead they went for coaches Jamie Joseph and Simon Culhane. New scrum advisor Kees Meeuws and chief executive Roger Clark were also present at the press conference held in a bar in Dunedin.

An NZRU media release was sent at 1.15pm today confirming the make-up of the five squads. Until that time media organisations had to contact each franchise in a bid to have the squad lists sent through. In the age of the internet and instant news, this isn't good enough.

Super Rugby? Let's hope so. A super start? Definitely not.