Gregor Paul: NZRU should cancel pointless French tests

In November, the All Blacks will play France in two full-blooded tests that will probably be the highlight of the season.

And then, inexplicably, the sides will meet again in June for two tests that will feature a heap of French nobodies and an All Black team shy of some household names.

It will be a pointless series, serving little purpose other than to further erode the value of test football. The French, like the All Blacks, are protecting their best players for the World Cup by giving them four weeks off in June.

The quality of their squad will be further reduced by the fact the French club championship playoffs will be on the same weekends as the tests. Imagine if the All Blacks had to play tests on the same weekends as the Air New Zealand Cup playoffs and couldn't select anyone from Auckland, Wellington, Waikato and Otago.

The smart thing to do would be for the New Zealand Rugby Union to tell the French to stay put. The loss of gate revenue would be a problem and SkyTV would need to be compensated for the cancellation.

But the short-term financial pain would be far less damaging than the long-term depreciation of the All Black brand.

Executives at SkyTV would prefer to show fewer, meaningful tests rather than copious volumes of wallpaper football that merely fills airspace under a false pretence. Viewers know when they are being sold a pup.

The NZRU is clearly, though, not going to call off the games. In a year where it will do well to break even, it wants the money in the bank. It also has a bit of bridge-building to do with its broadcast partners.

So it will agree to play two meaningless tests against France that will burden the All Blacks with having to play seven tests in eight weeks.

And that is hard to understand because the union has taken every opportunity to proclaim itself champion of player welfare. It pushed to change the timing of this year's third Bledisloe test to give the players a longer recovery and has agreed to remove 22 players from the first seven rounds of Super 14.

The first stance caused a fall out with the Australians and the second a stoush with News Limited. The NZRU pretty much won both battles, demonstrating its desire to help the All Blacks win the World Cup.

So why not risk a third falling out, this time with the IRB who will be outraged if the NZRU refused to play France next June?

If Graham Henry could plan the All Blacks' World Cup preparation, he would probably want a warm-up against Canada on June 9 before fielding his strongest team for all four Tri Nations tests.

He's not going to get what he wants, though, and there has to be concern that taking the players out of Super 14 might count for nothing if they are asked to get through a ludicrous pre-World Cup programme that will batter them to bits.

The NZRU, it appears, has not yet learned the art of picking its battles.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY