Gregor Paul: The underlying irony of New Zealand Rugby's problems

The irony of all this venting about to the so-called load management programme that is restricting the Super Rugby involvement of All Blacks, is that it won't be in operation next year.

This is the last year that we will see All Blacks managed in this way where they face a graduated return to play protocol and then must sit out at least two games during the season.

Next year it won't happen and New Zealand Rugby should be making this known.

It won't be happening next year because it won't need to. Super Rugby, which will revert to a 14-team round-robin competition, will start in the third week of February, giving test players a 12-week off-season.

That's enough time for them to rest and recondition appropriately and take part in pre-season fixtures.

The shorter competition – there will be 13 round-robin games as opposed to the 16 that are currently played - means there's no need to skip any.

Then there is going to be a two-week gap between the Super Rugby final and the first test in July so the All Blacks will be able to assemble, without any need to host training camps as they have in the past during the Super Rugby season.

The problem has been fixed. Load management is already an antiquated term and yet NZR continues to stay silent, allowing the uninformed and indignant to own the agenda and further batter the reputation of the game.

NZR needs to wake up to the need to win the PR battle at the moment. They seems oblivious to the fact that they need to be setting the media agenda on their own terms and controlling the narrative as saying nothing only adds to the empty seats and sense of doom attached to the game at the moment.

The sad truth is, though, that NZR often feel they don't need the media. They still live in this forgotten world where they think rugby doesn't need to promote itself – that it is too big, too popular to worry about explaining itself.

Kieran Read, Sam Whitelock, Joe Moody and Beauden Barrett line up for the national anthems. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

They still view the fourth estate not so much as a necessary evil as an evil and have no desire or strategy to get out in front of potential areas of conflict and controversy.

In the whole history of public relations, it has never proven a bad idea to get the story out first – tell it on your terms. Yet NZR seldom does.

An organisation with media savvy would have would never have stayed quiet about this year's load management protocol during Super Rugby.

The smart play was be to proactive, explain it was a one-season only directive.

Instead, they said nothing, let Super Rugby clubs moan about it publicly and give the impression they had never agreed to it when they had.

Highlanders assistant coach Tony Brown even suggested the policy had been responsible for killing the test careers of a few of the club's former players, which in the age of headline journalism, did untold damage to the game.

The net outcome for NZR is that they have once again been cast as the bad guys, controlling, secretive and dictatorial.

It's unfair, but when they say nothing, they set themselves up for negative publicity.

Just as curious, in fact more so, is the decision to not be transparent about the McKinsey Report.

By all accounts NZR are planning the biggest restructuring of the sport in the professional age and yet they want to do it behind closed doors.

TJ Perenara of the All Blacks leads the Haka during The Rugby Championship and Bledisloe Cup Test match between the New Zealand All Blacks and Wallabies. Photo / Getty Images.

They think it is a smart plan to fully brief the provinces about what they are thinking and not the media.

That's not smart – it's potentially disastrous as the provinces will spin things in the direction that suits them.

In any situation where significant change is proposed, there will be resistance. The provincial unions will latch on to one thing they don't like, push that into the public domain and in this day and age of fake news, once a so-called fact is in play, it will never be corrected or eliminated.

Look at Brexit, the whole leave campaign was promoted on a false premise that the UK sent £350 million a week to the European Union.

This is the information age and yet NZR continues to offer silence as their best means of dealing with major issues.

It makes no sense to be reticent to divulge – and even less when the media have some idea what is in the report, but not all of it.

Since the Herald revealed what was happening last week, there has been no shortage of debate, but how much of it has been properly informed?

Some have taken the liberty of filling in the areas where there is an information void and NZR watches on silently, no doubt enraged at some of the inaccuracies and lack of context.

But still it says nothing, as if the media are a law unto themselves; beyond being controlled or at least being steered in a direction that promotes a better public understanding of where the national game is being taken.

NZR can't win a PR war when they don't even realise they are in one.