John Roughan: League dealing low blows to New Zealand's name

The netball was so fast and scintillating at times last weekend that I waited until a break to look in on the league. I was just in time for the fight.

"This is more like it," I said as the Kiwis and Kangaroos were flailing their fists about. I like the odd scuffle in a football match, just one, to vent some tension and leave the heroes feeling as ridiculous as they looked. It's usually harmless and mildly hilarious.

But when this match resumed I realised it wasn't funny. When a Kiwi forward put in a sickening, cold-blooded cheap shot on a ball-carrying opponent I changed channels. There's no pleasure I can find in watching a game only one side wants to play.

I don't know much about league but it sometimes happens in rugby union that an outclassed team resorts to niggle and knuckle because it has no other way to compete. It is not usually a national team; pride and the pool of talent normally keep internationals on a higher plane.

I went back to the netball and by the time I checked on the league again the game had finished in the predictable Australian victory, so I watched the post-mortems.

Amazingly, the losers appeared to be in great spirits. Worse, their interviewers were in awe of the filth. It seemed to be agreed that in league terms the Kiwis had won something.

The next morning's newspapers were glowing about their effort. "Physically, they probably dominated," said the Sunday Star Times, "But although they won the battle, they lost the football match."

That, I suppose, is one way of saying it matters not whether you win or lose but the way you play the game.

Our way did not impress everyone who knows league. Former New South Wales coach Phil Gould wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: "When the fighting stopped and a game of football broke out, they had little to offer. New Zealand never came at us with much of a game plan and their lineup contains very few instinctive playmakers."

Our coach, Brian McClennan, seemed content that his players were not cowed. He claimed to see "something to build on" for the next match, in Melbourne tonight. Maybe he has a game plan now but his determination to turn the victim into the villain of the incident I saw last weekend, suggests the plan amounts to no more than another round of contrived resentment.

Big Willie Mason, who was nursing a suspected eye socket fracture after the game, deserved what he got apparently, because he had deeply offended our boys with some trash talk during the haka. He had used a four-letter word, would you believe, and it wasn't "mate".

I don't know or care what our league characters do when they are wearing club colours. But I do care when they are carrying New Zealand's name. Maybe we need an independent authority to defend the national brand. Teams that let us down could lose the right to represent us.

The players probably are not primarily at fault when you consider the commentaries and listen to the fans. The team is performing for a culture that sounds sick. Listen to Mathew Ridge on the game:

"The Kiwis did themselves proud last night ... They've got the physical capabilities and big hitters to worry the Aussies. They worry the Aussies physically more than the Aussies worry us, that's for sure."

The truly pathetic element of all this is that our league fraternity needs to prove its courage to itself. The sport is plainly suffering an inferiority complex. How else to explain the pleasure it has taken this week in discovering its players are not afraid to deal some low-blows to the Australians? Or the fuss that some New Zealand-born players in the Australian league elect to represent Australia.

How embarrassing to be a New Zealander over there this week. The way we played that game and, even more, the way we celebrated it, would have struck any Australian as contemptible, as indeed is our constant, tiresome ribbing of Australians in this country.

Netball is a notable exception. The rivalry is as intense as league's - both countries contest international supremacy in both sports - but the netballers manage to maintain obvious mutual regard and good-natured restraint.

With three sports on simultaneously last Saturday night I had opted, to my surprise, for rugby. Like most enthusiasts, if rugby attendances are an indication, I have passed the point of satiation this season.

It is nice to see a New Zealand side win the Super 14 again, and the All Blacks take the tri-nations, again, but we have been served too much of much the same for too long now.

When Paul Lewis confessed in his Herald On Sunday column that for the first time in his life he had fallen asleep in a test it was comforting to know I was not alone. I tried to work up some excitement for the matches in South Africa but when we lost the second I didn't care.

The provincial championship was played to sparse crowds everywhere. The games were played far below the pace we are now accustomed to enjoying, and the problem is deeper than the absence of All Blacks resting up for the infernal World Cup.

Once the class players returned, Auckland and Wellington produced a good semifinal last weekend and Waikato and Wellington are both in the form to produce a similar final tonight. But the Rugby Union must be worried about the gates and what they say about its ability to hold a television audience with more of the same.

Netball and league should be sniffing an opportunity. One of them is well positioned to broaden its appeal, one of them is not.