Why we should hold the Jonah Lomu benefit game at Twickenham, not Eden Park

There is an inescapable, yet growing unease at the prospect of the public being asked to prop up the futures of Jonah Lomu's family.

You can include the pipe-dream of a benefit match staged for the Jonah Lomu Legacy Trust into that mix.

For the game to be anything other than a failure it needs to be held at Twickenham, and even then you'd be right to fear for its success.

These are difficult sentences to write without sounding like the Grinch who stole Christmas but we have never done the worshiping superstars thing well in New Zealand.

The terminally sensitive call it Tall Poppy Syndrome, others just believe it is part of our egalitarian ethos - and that was evident with the well-staged but poorly attended memorial service at Eden Park.

It is beyond sad what happened to Lomu, a wondrous talent cruelled by an incurable kidney disease.

"He superseded anything we had seen before, and it is unlikely we will ever see the likes of again. He was an absolute rugby phenomenon," said his friend and former teammate Michael Jones.

That is true. He was a one of a kind, but his fiscal woes are pure sporting cliche. An anecdotal and absolutely unscientific straw poll of people I've talked to since news of his perilous finances became public revealed zero appetite for pledging assistance.
"He had more money than we'll ever have," was a familiar refrain.

I don't blame the Rugby Players' Association for trying, nobody should. Coming to the aid of past players who have fallen on hard times is part of their remit, but nor should they be offended if the response is tepid. The onus should first be on the Lomu and Quirk families, the ones who perhaps benefited most from Jonah's famed generosity, to ensure a bright future for Dhyreille and Brayley.

If rugby wants to help, then great. A benefit at Twickenham might work if some of the leading lights playing in Europe are released (though it should be cautioned that just 38,000 of the 80,000 seats were filled for the last Barbarians match to be staged there). Lomu is revered overseas and it could be marketed as world rugby's chance to say goodbye to the great man.

I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think it would work here. There is already a glut of high-quality live rugby that is played to sparsely populated stadia - I would have serious doubts about the drawing power of an inevitably low-quality match for a cause I'm not sure many truly believe in.