Despite a new coaching team and promising early signs, the Blues have endured yet another disappointing Super Rugby season. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
Even at the Blues hope springs eternal. That's maybe because hope is all they have got left.
They hope that Beauden Barrett is going to say yes to playing there. They hope that the arrival of Finlay Christie will give them at least one halfback who knows what he's doing.
They hope that an experienced midfielder and dynamic fullback will turn up from somewhere and they hope that a coaching panel scrambled together late last year is going to prove to be one year wiser in 2020.
What they are also hoping is that their decision to commission an independent review into why they struggle to identify, retain and recruit talent will offer a solution to the most significant problem to have plagued the club for the last decade.
The Blues have managed to recruit with the sort of foresight that suggests that they would have backed Betamax and not VHS and have done so without even realising there was a thing called the internet and streaming.
With quite stunning precision, they have consistently failed to pick the winners under their own noses and this year, much like every other, has highlighted the ineffectiveness of the Blues in securing the right players.
Braydon Ennor, Jack Goodhue, Josh Ioane and Pari Pari Parkinson all came through the 1A school competition and have all enjoyed outstanding Super Rugby campaigns.
But they have respectively done so for the Crusaders and Highlanders, while the Blues have bumbled along with an obviously inferior group of home-grown players.
Every club has the 'one who got away' but the Blues have a legion of players who they didn't so much as let get away, but failed to even realise were there in the first place and chairman Don Mackinnon has had enough of this being the dominant post-season lament.
Eddie Kohlhase, the former Black Sox captain and coach who is now with High Performance Sport NZ, has been asked to review the current system to identify the problems and recommend solutions.
The first part shouldn't be too hard as anyone who has even walked past Eden Park will have felt the simmering resentment and tension between Auckland and the Blues leaking from within.
The former has never accepted its role as the junior partner but has instead competed for players, serving only to confuse emerging talent about their probable career pathway and frustrate agents to the point their default advice has been to recommend the best schoolboys in the region look elsewhere for a contract.
Internecine conflict stretches back for years but became especially virulent in 2013 when Andy Dalton was retained as Auckland Rugby chief executive but no longer able to concurrently hold the same post at the Blues.
The new board installed after the injection of private equity in 2012 saw his dual position for the giant conflict of interest it was, but the split intensified the enmity and the sense that Auckland and the Blues weren't partners but rivals.
Such has been the inability of these two to work together that they nearly lost Rieko Ioane to the Chiefs and Niko Jones to the Crusaders.
"I think a relatively new board asked about the exodus of talent - the number of players who went to school in the Auckland region who don't end up at the Blues," says Mackinnon.
"Why is that? It is fair to say that two really obvious gaps were identified early on: these were our relationships with our three provincial unions and our relationships with our key secondary schools.
"It is a complicated model and particularly so in the Blues area. The initial contract for a young player is usually with the provincial union rather than with the Super Rugby club.
"But it is undoubtedly the case that in other parts of the country the unions and the Super Rugby club are incredibly well aligned. We are told for example that when a young athlete is looking at a contract with Canterbury it is totally aligned and integrated with the Crusaders.
"And that's the case with the other clubs but for various reasons that has not been the case in this area. And I think that has hurt the Blues and it has hurt Auckland, Northland and North Harbour. So what we have done is to look at getting on the same page as the three provincial unions."
Enough has happened in the last 10 months to believe Mackinnon is indeed proving to be a Mikhael Gorbachev figure ushering an era of Glasnost, with the most notable thawing being an agreement that Auckland's Mitre 10 Cup team can train at the Blues Alexandra Park headquarters this season.
But it will take more than the three provincial unions being pals again with the Blues and a unity of purpose document around recruitment and retention to actually see the right players commit to the region.
There are other problems facing the Blues, some of which will require genuinely bold initiatives to solve.
The punitive cost of living in the city is a deterrent to young talent wanting to play for the Blues.
Many schoolboy players of interest in the 1A are boarding and without parents living in the city, many are reluctant to stay.
The Blues are a rugby team and yet if they want to compete with the Crusaders, they may also have to become a real estate investor or at least entice a commercial partner who can help them secure a means to put low cost roofs over the heads of the young players they want to develop.
They also need to build more relationships with tertiary education providers. They have begun an alliance with MIT but need a broader range of education providers to make it easy and practical for young players to study in the city as part of their development contracts.
And quite obviously they need to invest in more talent identification personnel as at the moment they effectively have just two people doing that.
"A lot of this isn't rocket science. It is mainly about people," says Mackinnon who is a self-described optimist.
"Historically I think there was a time when Auckland and the Blues were at loggerheads and that's not the position now. The proof of that will ultimately be in the results we deliver and I will be accountable for those.
"I simply have the view that if somebody designed a recruitment and talent ID programme for this region, they wouldn't come up with what we have now.
"There is confusion and we have three shareholders in the Blues who compete for talent at their level, want the Blues to succeed but not at their own cost.
"Historically they have not shared resources with each other terribly well because they are competitors. So we have to break all that down, get back to a blank piece of paper and look at our core purpose of being in high performance and build something that is actually aligned.
"There is always going to be bit of competitive tension but our goal has to be what can we do to hep them win and what can they do to help the Blues win and I have seen enough systems to know that is achievable."
Maybe by this time next year, the Blues will have something more to clasp than hope.
Live updates of the third ODI between the Black Caps and Sri Lanka.