Dialogue: Pride missing in response to Cup extortion

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Sometimes a quiet sense of superiority doesn't go amiss. Not so long ago it was a distinguishing characteristic of this country's most successful international enterprise, rugby football.

But pride seems to have deserted our finest in the face of this World Cup extortion.

It hard to understand why the Rugby Union ever contemplated an arrangement that made us Australia's subsidiary host. It is even harder, now that we know the deal, to watch the union - and even the Minister for Sport - begging a favour of the International Rugby Board.

The minister, Trevor Mallard, subscribes to the economic fallacy that any event is worth having for the spin-off spending, but you could expect the Rugby Union to have been harder headed.

Extortion seems a fair description of the IRB's financial demands, exposed by reporters James Gardiner and Eugene Bingham in this newspaper last week.

Not only are the hosts expected to pay for the travel and accommodation of all participating teams, they are to pick up the bill for for 250 "VIPs" and 1000 guests of the international board's major sponsors, providing them with corporate hospitality at each venue.

The VIPs, it turns out, include the board's good friends, the International Olympic Committee. Rugby enthusiasts all, perhaps.

The obligation to strip stadiums of all commercial and contractual seating and corporate boxes for the duration, so that the IRB might exploit those to advantage, extends to all signs on the landscape within sight of the ground.

Then, having given up most of the likely revenue, the hosts must pay a fee, said to be between $6 million and $10 million in New Zealand's case, for the privilege of having the event here. Why would we bother?

Of all rugby-playing places, we have probably least need of the World Cup.

For minnows such as the United States and Japan, it is a rare opportunity to play in the big time. For the Europeans, it is a chance to see a clash or two of the titans, the All Blacks, Wallabies and Springboks.

Australia needs to hold the event because rugby is a second or third-rate winter game there and a World Cup may attract attention. And in South Africa the festival has been a chance to bring rugby into the heart of the rainbow nation.

But here? It is a little odd that the NZRFU should have conceded ground on its national provincial championship to make room for the Cup's pool games. Given a choice of watching Canada play Romania, say, or Waikato against Northland, any discerning follower would go for the latter.

The World Cup has brought just one benefit to rugby in this country. It has proved to be an extra antidote to complacency, not that we need one. The All Blacks have only to lose a test and rugby followers descend into the darkest despondency, declaring our dominance at an end.

The mood turns particularly dark when we fail to win the World Cup. We have taken to regarding it as the world championship, though it must be much harder to win the Southern Hemisphere's annual Tri-Nations series.

In that series the big three must play each other twice. Any one of them could win the World Cup by beating just two decent sides.

Not many New Zealand rugby followers see the All Blacks as those in other countries do. New Zealand is to rugby what Australia is to cricket and Brazil is to soccer. That is, they lose often enough, even drop a series occasionally. But they are the teams others least want to meet.

Despite professionalism and the larger purses offered our players by other countries, New Zealand is still the world's richest reservoir of rugby talent. Players who could not make the All Blacks now regularly turn out for British national teams and frequently those teams are coached by New Zealanders.

The World Cup, like most developments of the game, was practically conceived by this country. The NZRFU was one of the unions that spent years trying to convince the international board that a quadrennial world tournament would be a good idea.

Eventually, in 1987, New Zealand hosted the first of them, giving a few matches to Australia, and won it.

Since then, the tournament has become the board's principal revenue earner, and that is a good thing so long as most of the loot finds its way to places where the sport is in need of a boost.

Like many developments in business and economic life generally, the World Cup has simply outgrown this country's capacity to host it. There is no harm in that, and certainly no need to prostrate ourselves in an attempt to keep the event.

The low value of the dollar and the disadvantage of distance from the world's richest television audiences have also played their part in pricing the tournament out of our reach.

But those are symptoms of a small population and the low-density living New Zealanders say they prefer.

To retain the world's best rugby probably requires the same recipe as that prescribed for a First World living standard in an economy of this size. It is most likely a matter of maintaining the human reservoir of skill, enthusiasm and competition.

Complacency puts those standards at risk but we seem to be erring lately the opposite way. Occasional recognition of our continued excellence might keep little disappointments like the World Cup in perspective.