New Zealand Rugby (NZRU) chief executive Steve Tew, in front of the trophy cabinet, after announcing he will stand down from the position. Photo / Mark Mitchell
New Zealand Rugby (NZRU) chief executive Steve Tew, in front of the trophy cabinet, after announcing he will stand down from the position. Photo / Mark Mitchell
COMMENT:
Steve Tew's successor will start work at New Zealand Rugby later this year and discover there is not much pressing business.
A new All Blacks coach will be appointed after the World Cup and be jointly handled by the outgoing Tew and his successor.
Once that's out of theway, the to-do list isn't expansive. By then, it's probable the next broadcast negotiation will be well advanced and all the must-keep players will be locked in to contracts.
The future format of Super Rugby has already been decided. Two key sponsorship deals with adidas and AIG have a few years to run and maybe there will even have been progress on the World League concept.
It wasn't that his regime was oblivious to the seriousness of the problem or lacked an awareness of its importance. Far from it.
Tew desperately tried to increase Auckland's playing numbers and drive kids towards the sport. He invested in an Auckland specialist whose remit was to find a way to increase the profile of the sport and participation in the region.
Graham Henry and Steve Tew in 2011. Photo / Brett Phibbs
He commissioned a task force that included former World Cup-winning All Blacks coach Graham Henry to dig deep into the issues and come up with some ideas on what could be done to rebuild Auckland as New Zealand's major rugby power centre.
And he even made the bold call to buy back a controlling share in the Blues last year, drop some NZR firefighters on to the board and get hands-on in fixing what has been the country's most troubled Super Rugby club for the past decade.
Tew threw all he had at Auckland but it was a banging his head against a brick wall sort of exercise. He will leave the job with Auckland's playing numbers still worryingly low and with rugby struggling to win hearts and minds of an ethnically diverse population.
He will leave with the Blues still pretty much the weakest New Zealand club in Super Rugby and Eden Park still mostly a cavernous, empty shell of a thing whenever they play there.
Auckland will be the only significant fail in what will be remembered as a hugely successful tenure.
For the new broom, the challenge will be to muster the same energy to tackle the problem as Tew had, but to somehow crack the magic formula of what specifically will work in trying to help rugby take a greater hold in the city again.
New Zealand Rugby (NZRU) chief executive Steve Tew, left, with chairman Brent Impey. Photo / Mark Mitchell
And in this, the next chief executive may benefit from a change in philosophy that started to take hold late last year.
NZR, having commissioned a major review into the state of schools rugby last year, is changing its mindset on how to drive participation.
It has rid itself of the notion that everyone who picks up a ball needs to ultimately end up a full contact 15-a-side player.
They now see the value of having people play non-contact rugby for life. If they foster a love for any kind of rugby, they are a better prospect to buy a broadcast subscription or Super Rugby season ticket than if they tried full contact rugby, hated it and felt rejected by the sport.
Such a mindset may be particularly valuable in Auckland, where the figures show that thousands of boys in their early teens give up playing and then engaging with professional rugby.
Auckland's diverse population results in there often being enormous physical differences between boys of the same age.
Those who are smaller often get hurt, become scared about playing and gravitate to different, non-contact sports.
They lose all interest in following rugby and presumably some foster a sense of shame that they weren't "tough" enough to play and hence feel they can't have a connection as a fan.
Perhaps Auckland's future is to have thousands of players involved in non-contact rugby and only a select minority playing the game as we know it.
It would be a somewhat curious scenario but that might be the road down which the new chief executive has to travel to fix Auckland and ensure there is at least one great achievement in their tenure at the top of NZR.
