State of the union: Part 3

By EUGENE BINGHAM, JAMES GARDINER and WARREN GAMBLE

Out in the rural heartland, once New Zealand rugby's stronghold, the provinces are struggling.

Neil Olsen, chairman of Thames Valley Rugby Football Union, definitely believes the sport is in decline and he simply does not know what to do to halt it.

After secondary school, it's a tough task to get young players to join a club, play a season and return. Where five years ago the Thames Valley rep side, the Swamp Foxes, had 10 senior A clubs to select from, this year they are down to six.

There are still 12 clubs but half of them are unable to field sides strong enough for the top club competition.

And there are signs it will get worse before it gets better, Olsen says. There are now only four under-21 sides. Partly, that is to do with trying to keep the senior teams going, with the stronger and more talented teenagers often being selected when they should be developing with players their own age. Instead 17- and 18-year-olds are playing with and against men as old as 40.

Gate takings at club games barely cover maintenance costs. A typical crowd at an NPC match is 600 to 700. A $150,000 annual grant from the NZRFU enables Thames Valley to run an office, employ a chief executive and a rugby development officer, both fulltime.

Poverty Bay RFU publicity officer Roger Driver: "It's more and more difficult to get the young people to stay in from about high school age through those teen years. Poverty Bay's got a lot of other sports that compete with us."

He cites golf, surf lifesaving and other water-based sports.

Urban population drift has forced clubs to merge or close. Teams travel further to play. There are more mismatches, which frustrates players and spectators. No one likes running up a cricket score and no one wants to see their team thrashed on a regular basis.

The Poverty Bay union has tried to counter sagging spectator interest by lowering gate prices for club matches to $3 for adults and $2 for children.

As well as the $150,000 contribution from the NZRFU, Driver says Poverty Bay has been lucky to be in the franchise area of the successful (in terms of crowd support, anyway) Hurricanes Super 12 team. That means a financial contribution from franchise profits to the union, the size of which Driver says he is not allowed to reveal.

Nationally, the game is financially flush. The NZRFU's $76 million income last year, made up largely from television rights of $34.5 million, and $33.9 million from sponsors led by adidas, was up 23 per cent from 1999.

Income was only $15.8 million in the first full year of professionalism in 1996, but is expected to reach $100 million in 2004.

Even so, Rutherford says, the game will need more money to grow, partly to restore the status of school and club rugby. This year the union announced it would be giving the 27 provincial unions $7.5 million directly, plus spending another $4 million on initiatives such as improving coaching, and boosting promotion and recruitment programmes in clubs and schools.

For the first time, the provinces will this year sign performance agreements with the union to develop the game at all levels in their areas.

Rutherford says extra money could come from the union's push for the All Blacks to get their fair share of revenue from overseas tours.

They are the number one rugby broadcasting and spectator attraction - filling the Stade de France last year and drawing six million French viewers, six times the number who watched Australia the week before.

Yet under quaint rules which date back to amateur days, the All Blacks do not get a cent of the overseas broadcasting rights or gate sales. While the reverse is true for touring teams here, the imbalance in audience size leaves New Zealand worse off.

Rutherford says while the union has managed to stop the loss of its elite players, the extra money would be needed to stop the drain of its second tier players. They were players who strengthened national and club competitions, and their loss to bigger paying overseas countries would weaken the game here.

The Players' Association executive manager, Rob Nichol, believes the problems of player retention could become an even bigger threat that New Zealand may have to take an innovative approach to.

"What you are seeing is a transition where once when a player went overseas, he was gone for good, to the odd situation where individuals are coming back," says Nichol, whose imposing height makes him look like he'd go well in a lineout.

"The next step is to engineer a situation where we can use the global market place ... to manage our talent."

Cut through the consultant-speak and you'll find that what he's talking about is setting up an affiliation with an overseas club so that New Zealand could send its second-tier players off-shore for a set period of top-level international experience.

Sitting in his Newmarket office decorated by a whiteboard scrawled with figures such as "30 x $75,000," Nichol dreams of a day when young players who miss out on Super 12 contracts could instead be offered opportunities overseas that would not mean they were lost to New Zealand.

It would be another option for administrators trying to keep New Zealand's talent pool deep. At the top end of the market, players like Jonah Lomu are signed up to lucrative contracts keeping them here. But what has to be done to keep up-and-coming players playing rugby in this country?

For 24-year-old winger Patrick Patelo, the lure of a black jersey is still strong. But his commitment to rugby has been severely tested over the past few years by the pressures that come with being a semi-professional player.

Patelo was picked out for stardom early on when he made the New Zealand Secondary Schools side playing for De la Salle College in Mangere. Selectors picked him for the Rugby Academy in 1998, about the time he was being pounded by a wave of injuries.

Repeated hamstring problems, two serious concussions and a broken jaw later, and Patelo was really starting to wonder why he was even bothering to keep going. "I got quite depressed ... because I was really struggling. I began to think I was never going to get there."

His confidence was boosted when he was picked for the 1999 New Zealand Colts team, but problems of a different kind began when the Auckland province lent him to Northland for the 1999 NPC season. "I was missing out on player payments and I ended up a little bit disillusioned."

With matters coming to a head, he sat down with his now wife and talked about where his rugby was going. With his desire for top-level rugby still strong, Patelo made a decision to transfer to Counties; he had grown up in Papakura so it felt like coming home.

"I wanted to start anew at Counties and I could see some real opportunities." He made the NPC side last year. As a bonus, he has pushed his way into contention for the national sevens squads through Counties.

The prospect of a Super 12 contract is tantalisingly close, but the pursuit of it is costly. With the support of his young family, he is waking up at 6 am for training, heading off to work as a store manager for Puma and driving from his home in Henderson to Papakura for rugby practice three nights a week. Then there's game day.

"I'm only semi-professional in the way that I earn through football," said Patelo. "But to me the meaning of all this is to get into teams and to have pride in the jerseys I pull on the same way I did when I made the New Zealand Secondary Schools team."

For established star Tana Umaga, the pride is still there, whether he is turning out for Wellington, the Hurricanes or the All Blacks.

But like all sporting professionals, the fame and fortune bears a price on and off the field.

After playing around 30 games for the three sides last year in a season which stretched from early January to mid-December, he admits to feeling mentally stale in a couple of early Super 12 matches this year.

"It's not so much playing the rugby, it's just the intensity in your mind required to play at these levels.

"They want you all at the highest intensity every time for every competition, and I think that's too hard. You have got to have a time where you can relax and come down."

Although some might regard the national championship as a less pressured competition, Umaga said its heritage and parochial pride often gave it an edge just as hard as the Super 12.

He is suspicious of using tiredness as the full excuse for the Hurricanes' poor start this year.

"We could have been looking for a quick answer, you know, we're tired so that's why we are not playing well."

He comes back to poor decision-making and not following the game plan as root causes for the failure to make the semi-finals.

Umaga, who had a couple of highly publicised incidents involving alcohol, has cut down on the drinking and now lets off steam by writing out his frustrations in a diary.

Of course, there was a time when frustrations would be taken out on the field. With a fist. Many believe New Zealand rugby has lost the mongrel edge that made it formidable and fearsome.

Controversial London Sunday Times rugby writer Stephen Jones says the All Black forwards need to harden up. "My old grandmother would fancy her chances against the recent New Zealand locks, and she died in the 1970s."

Jones says we've been seduced by Australia into thinking our interests are the same, and conned by Aussie-led American-style marketeers into thinking sports fans are simpletons and only want to see rugby league-style play with endless ball movement.

"Sickly continuity has murdered your fantastic heritage of forward play."

He does not, however, accept that our rugby is in decline. "New Zealand has always been the greatest rugby country on Earth and probably always will be. Three of the five greatest rugby teams I have seen have been All Black teams and I expect to see another great one in the medium-term."

Johannesburg-based sports journalist Dan Retief, who works for the pay TV station M-Net Supersport, is confident the All Blacks will still be tough to beat.

"It's very difficult for South Africans to think of New Zealand as being in decline because there's so much respect for New Zealand players and what they represent in the game."

Sydney Morning Herald reporter and former Wallaby Peter Fitzsimons also doesn't "think the New Zealand house is on fire."

"Any All Black side that boasts the likes of Jonah Lomu and Christian Cullen can't be in too bad a shape. There has to be the possibility there of a fantastic season."

At rugby headquarters, Rutherford says we have to learn how to handle defeats better, and celebrate wins more.

"But one of the magnificent things about rugby in New Zealand is the utterly unrealistic expectation that we will win every game, and long may it last."

And, if nothing else this year, he hopes to get the sheep off his back.