Codie Taylor is on the Breakdown to talk about the Crusaders Investec Super Rugby Aotearoa victory while Rod Kafer gives an update from Australia and Joe Wheeler talks up the South ahead of the North v South clash.
COMMENT:
I've seen the future of winter sport in Auckland, and for the Blues and the Warriors. It's called Eden Park.
Eden Park's been maligned, threatened with conversion to a housing complex, sued over wanting to use the place for concerts, and has even served as a Covid-19 testing base.
But right now, as the Auckland City Council and the Eden Park Trust Board plan a relationship so tight the council may end up naming a majority of trust board members, I'd put good money on a move from Mt Smart for the Warriors.
To quote Auckland mayor Phil Goff in a radio interview this week, "It's extremely unlikely that we're going to put $350 million into upgrading Mt Smart Stadium when the Warriors could easily play at Eden Park. And the Warriors chief executive is coming round to that way of thinking. Stadiums cost money and if we could have all (codes) on one rectangular field that makes sense to me."
Goff also suggested that while Eden Park could need at least $500 million for improvements, that cost paled, in a post-Covid world, with the $1 billion to $2 billion a brand new stadium would cost the city.
Fans cheers on the Blues during a Super Rugby Aotearoa match. Photosport
It happens that the stars have aligned for putting most of the city's sporting eggs in the Eden Park basket.
Auckland has fallen in love with the Blues again. How else do you explain the fact that the Blues are now wrestling with how to deal with reimbursing 43,236 ticket holders for their sold out cancelled game with the Crusaders?
A side effect of the Blues revival has been that Eden Park, an echoing, melancholy place when there's a miserable 8000 or so people spread over the vast arena, buzzes when it's packed.
At a time when paranoia and scare mongering over Covid-19 is on the rise, let's look ahead instead to what could be a bright, shining city on a sporting hill in future winters.
Nathan Brown and Phil Gould get the Warriors into gear. They start to load the team, as was the case when the Warriors made the grand finals in 2002 and 2011, with local players. The fans respond the way rugby supporters have to the Blues in Super Rugby Aotearoa.
The Warriors won't play at Mt Smart in 2020. Photosport
Hand in hand with that revival, Leon MacDonald continues to show his rugby coaching prowess, and when the Blues play the Crusaders, or the Chiefs, or the Hurricanes, the intensity and public interest is like a test match.
Between the Blues and the Warriors and All Black rugby, a stage could be reached where there's barely a weekend when there isn't a big game at Eden Park.
Stadiums in New Zealand and Australia have never made money. They're a facility provided from public funds for the enjoyment of the population, in the same way art galleries, swimming pools and libraries are. But the busier Eden Park is, the less drain there will be on the public purse.
Hell, with council involvement we might even get to see the summer concerts at Eden Park well organised moaners have been preventing for far too long.
Good on everyone involved for making the last game in Super Rugby Aotearoa, the 38-21 win for the Highlanders over the Hurricanes, as much fun as a festival, attack at all costs, match, if festival rugby also involved shuddering tackles.
Patelesio Tomkinson on the charge for the Highlanders against the Hurricanes. Photosport
But for future years, would it be possible to red card the marketing genius who decided it'd be a good idea, for a game only seen on television, to send out both teams in playing strips that were, as a friend deeply immersed in rugby noted online, "so close in colour that when there was a long shot on screen you couldn't tell one bloody side from the other."
Finally, the most sobering comment I've ever read from a professional player as the hits gets bigger and bigger in rugby all over the world. A quote from his biography from Rotorua-born Dylan Hartley, who played 96 tests at hooker for England, and captained them for three years, should stop anyone who loves the game in their tracks .
He says: "My generation of players have been crash dummies for a sport in transition from semi-professionalism. It is being reshaped, subtly but relentlessly, by money men, geo-politicians, talking heads and television executives. They treat us as warm bodies, human widgets. Players cut the ends off their boots so they can play with broken toes. They gobble painkillers like Smarties. After matches dressing rooms are like M*A*S*H clearing houses. People are being put back together with stitches and glue. Senior players have bits falling off them."
In those seven excoriating sentences he sums up why an all-local derby Super competition here is too intense to be sustainable.
