Cheree Kinnear is joined by NZ Herald’s Lachlan Waugh as they look ahead to the Super Rugby final, Supercars Supersprint plus more this weekend. Video / NZ Herald
OPINION:
The Crusaders are 80 minutes from a fifth successive Super Rugby title and one, that should it be secured, will cement the club's place as the most dominant force in the Southern Hemisphere.
It will be title number 12 and should it be delivered, it will preserve the Crusaders'perfect record of never having lost a playoff game at home.
That a club, parked in the backwaters of the South Island in a city which was destroyed by an earthquake 10 years ago, has been so outrageously successful for such an inordinately long period, is a success story almost without parallel.
And yet, while another title will induce a wave of pride and celebration in Christchurch and the wider Canterbury and Tasman regions, it will foster grudging respect, at most, from those outside the region, but more likely will have the greater effect of swelling the undercurrent of jealousy that already exists.
It is the curse of dominant teams that they induce as much resentment as they do respect - a phenomenon that is curiously powerful in New Zealand rugby and harder to understand in some respects as in the modern age there has been a direct link between money and sporting success which has been the prime fuel on which the anger has run.
Leicester Faingaanuku of the Crusaders and Mitchell Drummond of the Crusaders celebrates Codie Taylor of the Crusaders try. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
The distorted economics of big brand European football have created a festering inequality where best has become synonymous with richest and an unbreakable cycle has gripped where the more the cashed-up win, the less anyone cares and the more the disenfranchised masses hate them.
While rugby in this country – at least not Super Rugby - has never been contaminated or skewed by the unequal distribution of wealth, there's still an argument to say that repeat winners in New Zealand have long been pilloried by those who don't have a heart string attached to the victors.
The great Auckland side of the 1980s and early 1990s fostered unequal measures of opprobrium as they did success.
That narrative was built on the myth of overpriced lattes and Bohemian lifestyles, disproportionate government spending and an almost default provincial belief that hating Auckland is an obligation.
To some degree, the Crusaders are picking up a bit of that heat now: that almost primal need that many feel to find reasons to deconstruct a champion team and paint an alternative, less flattering truth to explain their prolonged success.
Crusaders head coach Scott Robertson and Highlanders head coach Tony Brown. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
It's almost as if the prevailing fear in New Zealand is that a dominant team is of itself proof of inequity and a danger that has to be stopped. Perhaps it offends this sensibility of humility being paramount in rugby and success to this degree can be considered arrogance.
The dirt thrown at the Crusaders is that they are not the homespun, local side they like everyone to believe they are.
They don't, with the odd exception, chase after the established stars of the game, but they do brilliantly identify and then lure the best teenage prospects from other regions.
There's no better example of that than Richie McCaw, who the world swears was born and raised in Christchurch when he was in fact the property of Otago until he was, almost randomly, spotted by Steve Hansen in his capacity as Crusaders academy coach.
Kieran Read is another stamped with the Canterbury hallmark, yet he's a South Auckland man. Just as Sam Whitelock and Codie Taylor are from the Manawatu, Scott Barrett from Taranaki, Jack Goodhue Northland and Braydon Ennor Auckland.
The Crusaders poach talent like everyone else, they just do it better, then nurture, develop and integrate it better. They are the masters at rebranding – somehow taking proud Aucklanders and Northlanders and selling them to the world as died-in-the-wool Crusaders.
It's skilled and it's clever – which annoys those who can't find a means to compete and brings things back to why this growing resentment is so curious.
Far from being a team to jeer or denigrate, the Crusaders should be a source of genuine celebration for sports lovers everywhere.
Their success is not built on the strength of their balance sheet. They don't have a Russian oligarch, oil sheikh or tech billionaire bankrolling them as a vanity project.
They operate with the same budgetary constraints as every other Super Rugby team and thrive on old fashioned values of hard work, innovation, excellence and unity of culture.
The Crusaders are one of the last links to the golden age of purity – where it was possible for everyone and anyone to succeed if they rolled their sleeves up, worked hard and were smart and creative in all aspects of their craft.
Whether another Crusaders title is good or bad for the game here seems an odd question for some to be asking as they already are.
Their continued success is not indicative of anything being inherently wrong or unfair in the set-up of Super Rugby, but instead is proof that there is something endemic within the Crusaders that enables them to build and sustain a winning culture that should induce a far greater ratio of admiration to resentment than it is likely to.
