Louisa Wall: Two sides to loyalty issue

Dave Dobbyn's song Loyal, synonymous with New Zealand's America's Cup campaign, has reverberated as a concept of relevance within the professional sports domain for over a month.

The song asks to be "called loyal" and says that "we are loyal too" but that sentiment is far from reality in the professional sports game.

There is no trust but a need for loyalty via restraints of trade to be guaranteed mostly from the employees and not the employers.

And so former Team New Zealand leader Tom Schnackenberg has decided to challenge such a restraint of trade convention. As a nine cup campaigner, he is gunning for 10 and as he has been described as "the best brain in yachting" he has more to offer the sport, if not for Team New Zealand then another syndicate.

Team New Zealand was not so loyal, discarding him in December 2004, and they don't want anyone else to have his skills either.

Schnackenberg held the syndicate together when Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth defected to Alinghi. But Schnackenberg was demoted.

Round-the-world helmsman Grant Dalton was brought in to manage the next challenge and Schnackenberg was history.

I think a bloke so loyal deserved the same level of loyalty in return.

What confidential information has he got?

John Mitchell has a lot of intellectual property about how the All Blacks and the New Zealand Rugby Union function, but he was not stopped from coaching in Perth.

Stacey Jones' sense of loyalty to the Warriors, and his level of professionalism, motivated him to gracefully retire from the Kiwis last season as a 34-test veteran, in a bid to rebuild not only his own game but also the Warriors' confidence.

I would prefer for him to play for the Kiwis but it seems he just wants to be left alone to play football at the Warriors before he takes up his contract in France.

Carlos Spencer has shown the same loyalty to Auckland rugby, even it has meant sitting on the bench.

But his impending departure for England means rugby will be soon missing three top players with Crusaders Andrew Mehrtens and Justin Marshall also linked to English clubs.

The Crusaders do everything well. Any player who ventures down there invariably becomes better. The culture seems to work in everyone's best interests.

So, loyalty it seems is practised as a tried and true recipe for success and the notion is alive and well in the south. Let's hope us northerners are open to learning a few things about loyalty.

* Louisa Wall is a former New Zealand netball and rugby representative.