New Zealand Rugby House, in Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
May 30 is looming as a landmark day in New Zealand Rugby’s future as a threat to split the game dominates the lead-up to a special general meeting; NRL hissy fits at the Magic Round; and the A-League spot-fixing drama, with the odd tweet from a Kiwi sports presenter.
ANALYSIS
The guns are drawn and this is not going to be pretty.
Rugby should be fearful of the Mexican stand-off it has created as the unholy governance war reaches a peak that now represents an existential threat to the game’s future in New Zealand.
It’s difficult to think of a greater divide in rugby’s history in this country than where we find ourselves following the New Zealand Rugby Players Association’s (NZRPA) threat to take over management of the professional game from New Zealand Rugby (NZR) and its provincial unions.
The Cavaliers saga was rugby against the public.
This is rugby pitched against rugby.
As I have written consistently for some time now, the $260 million Silver Lake private equity deal has both exposed how broken New Zealand’s rugby ecosystem has become during the professional era, and added some further poison in along the way.
It was a dreadful strategic mistake by NZR to allow itself to be seduced by private equity, and not just because the investment seems to have been squandered, but also because the deal is blowing up in the faces of the provincial unions who helped the national body usher it through.
The greater damage was the public flushing-out of just how distrustful and dysfunctional the relationship between NZR and the players’ union (once the envy of other national rugby bodies and sports) had become.
Angered over being left out of the early Silver Lake negotiations and questioning the need for any sugar hit at all, the NZRPA then exposed a naive NZR board and executive strategy, and played a legal trump card around withholding player image rights.
The letter the association sent to the provincial unions was signed by some of the biggest names in the national game: Richie McCaw, David Kirk, Sam Cane, Sam Whitelock and Ruby Tui were all there.
It is the same legal card it has played this time – only with a theatrical banging of the table and a menacing threat to the provincial unions about voting for their alternate governance model at NZR’s now-landmark special general meeting next Thursday.
The governance review at the heart of all of this was, of course, secured by the NZRPA as one of the conditions for agreeing to a revised Silver Lake deal.
After initially (and predictably) using smoke and mirrors to soften the strong recommendations made by the review panel and then being wearied by the constant politics, NZR’s board now resembles a beaten dog.
It is hopelessly divided, still out of its depth and seemingly controlled and influenced too much by senior executives – all reasons why, as the Pilkington Review concluded, the directors should all go.
The current directors now seem resigned to that fate and the real fight has become between the NZRPA and the 26 provincial unions effectively being asked to sign themselves into oblivion if they accept the review’s recommendations.
There is an irony here.
The NZRPA, representing the interests of the professional players, has only been around since 1999 while the provincial unions have controlled rugby in this country for more than a century.
Sports Insider has already heard claims that the NZRPA has overplayed its hand, that it only represents 250-odd players, which is a minuscule percentage of Aotearoa’s playing base, and that its leaders have become too ambitious.
Against that, the provincial unions’ rhetoric that they know best in the face of a track record that suggests otherwise, and their dismal performance during the first Silver Lake negotiation, coupled with their hand-out mentality, draws little confidence from me.
For every argument about the sliver of the playing population the NZRPA represents, there is the counter that the All Blacks create virtually all the money that powers the entire rugby ecosystem in New Zealand.
Not withstanding the argument over the NZRPA’s latest bombshell tactic, the best and most pragmatic outcome would be for the provincial unions to run up the white flag and surrender to the inevitable.
That at least leaves the rugby public – the real owners of the game – with some hope that from the wreckage we can salvage a sensible way forward by adopting the Pilkington Review in full.
After all, as David Pilkington and his fellow panellists including former All Blacks captain Graham Mourie pointed out this week, this entire episode has lain bare the review’s salient point – that New Zealand rugby’s governance model is no longer fit for purpose.
But now the fear of losing power coupled with impending funding cuts in the Silver Lake deal’s failure to date to kickstart the All Blacks’ commercial programme has several powerful provincial unions fretting and some angry over the NZRPA’s tactics.
It perhaps leaves voting delegates in a mood silly enough to force a split in the game by sticking to their guns on May 30. Sir John Kirwan is right to express his fear about the future.
Wikipedia describes a “Mexican stand-off” as “a confrontation where no strategy exists that allows any party to achieve victory” and where “anyone initiating aggression might trigger their own demise”.
It’s hard to argue that we’re not at that point now and next Thursday stands as a day of reckoning the game has never before seen in this country.
The much-ballyhooed rails run being granted to Papua New Guinea to become the 18th franchise in Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL) almost became spectacularly unstuck during the competition’s Magic Round in Brisbane.
NRL chairman Peter V’Landys used an opening Magic Round press conference last Friday to berate bureaucrats he believed were holding up A$600 million ($652m) in Australian Government financial support for the expansion team.
“This is D-Day!” he declared, claiming he would walk away from the PNG bid unless those getting in the way came to heel.
But the Government’s Pacific Minister Pat Conroy, charged with dispersing American aid money granted to Australia to invest in the South Pacific to see off Chinese expansion, wasn’t wearing that bullying approach and bristled up as well.
“When I negotiate with people, I do it behind closed doors,” Conroy said before then announcing the Queensland Reds rugby union side would play matches in Tonga under a Government-funded PacificAus Sports programme.
He then testily added: “I’m announcing a deepening of our partnership with rugby union, so it’s self-evident that the Australian Government has a number of options about who we partner with.”
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the reference to rugby union as another “option” for funding had V’Landys fuming during the Friday night double-header and he threw a world-class hissy fit.
The clash of egos reportedly settled down over the weekend as the rival parties thrashed out their differences and the bizarre pact for a Papua New Guinea side seems to be back on track now.
But Conroy’s threat made me wonder why rugby isn’t doing more to follow V’Landys’ lead – if not his behaviour – in seeking politically motivated funding for certain teams.
If even half the rumours about Moana Pasifika’s Super Rugby Pacific future hold water, the Tana Umaga-coached franchise is fighting for survival.
But when they played their first “home” game in Tonga against the Highlanders this month, Moana Pasifika excited scenes like those of the Fijian Drua playing in Suva.
Papua New Guinea isn’t the only South Pacific island nation where sport is a big deal (their Prime Minister leapt at the chance for an NRL team). Tonga, Samoa and the Solomons are equally strategically important to warding off Chinese interests.
Moana Pasifika is currently funded by World Rugby and New Zealand Rugby with a little bit of Government money in there and some corporate support from Sky TV.
Why doesn’t the game think more laterally and pursue some of US President Joe Biden’s spend instead, thereby securing the future of a struggling but important cog in Super Rugby Pacific’s ecosystem?
Sounds like one of the first jobs the new Super Rugby Pacific commissioner should be on to.
Narelle Sindos is most recognisable as an Auckland-based sports reporter and presenter for Newshub.
She is also engaged to All White Clayton Lewis, who is one of three players arrested and charged by New South Wales police last Friday over a spot-fixing scandal in football’s A-League. Lewis and two Macarthur FC teammates are alleged to have deliberately picked up yellow cards in order to manipulate betting markets, in a move co-ordinated out of South America.
It has been alleged that Lewis received A$10,000 for his role.
All of this now emerging adds an intriguing element to a social media post Sindos made on May 10 – six days before Lewis’ arrest.
“Betting on red cards is the best way to make money atm,” she wrote.
Sindos appears to be referencing the A-League semifinal between Sydney FC and the Central Coast Mariners. The second leg of the clash, played last Saturday, featured a 98th-minute red card to a Sydney FC player.
It’s surely just unfortunate timing that Sindos posted what would otherwise be a humorous comment about sports betting and player ill-discipline almost a week before her fiancee’s arrest.
Curiously (as at time of writing) she hasn’t deleted the tweet.
Newshub is of course winding up next month and Sindos has secured a Sydney-based co-presenter role with Australian pay TV network Optus Sport for its upcoming coverage of the 2024 Euro Championships.
She had previously worked for Optus during the New Zealand leg of last year’s Fifa women’s World Cup tournament.
The Herald sought comment from Optus over whether her tweet would impact on her employment for the popular tournament.
Head of Optus Sport Howard Rees replied via email: “We are supporting Narelle during this time, and we are looking forward to her co-hosting our upcoming broadcast of Uefa Euro 2024.”
There are already many dissecting this latest spot-fixing controversy with growing commentary that the A-League has an unbalanced approach to paying its players, forcing some from lower levels to look for other revenue sources to boost their income.
Indeed, the financially troubled competition is overpaying its star players relative to the worth of its television broadcast contracts compared to rivals like the NRL and AFL.
One of the few realists, Central Coast Mariners owner Richard Peil, ripped into A-League bosses this week.
“There is a model that is sustainable if people stop paying ridiculous wages that aren’t supported by the current financial model of the league,” Peil said.
“AFL and NRL have billion-dollar deals. Ours is substantially less. Our corporate sponsorship dollars are much less. Yet some players are getting $1.2, $1.3 million, which is more than what [Penrith NRL star] Nathan Cleary is on.
“We are simply paying the players at the top end way too much for the league to be sustainable.”
Taharoa: The sleepy Waikato village near the west coast on the way to surfing mecca Raglan has a population of little more than 200 but produced three star performers in the NRL’s Magic Round.
Te Maire Martin had his best game yet for the Warriors while the other standout in the upset of mighty premiers Penrith was rookie fullback Taine Tuaupiki. Add in a storming performance off the bench for the Brisbane Broncos by giant forward Xavier Willison in their Magic Round win.
All three hail from Taharoa – the little town that could.
Scotty McLaughlin: Recorded the fastest-ever qualifying lap time in Indy 500 history and now has the chance to drink from the same milk bottle as fellow Kiwi Scott Dixon at the Brickyard when the real deal goes down on Monday morning, NZ time.
Eliza McCartney: The Olympic bronze medalist’s call-out of the overly harsh Games qualification conditions imposed on aspiring Kiwi track and field athletes was poignant and compelling. She’s right. It is unfairly crushing the dreams of those within touching distance of greatness if people believed in them.
The next step in their evolution is increasing the precision in the final third.