Be it doctors, teachers or rugby players, New Zealand doesn’t seem to know how to hang on to them or how to stop viewing the exodus as some kind of badge of honour.
Whether this need to celebrate training and developing high-performing talent for other nations is drivenby naivety, arrogance or a sense of inferiority is hard to tell.
In terms of rugby players, it is probably a little bit of all three – but with a pronounced sense of arrogance as it is interpreted as confirmation of the default thinking that New Zealand’s talent pool is internationally recognised as the best.
But it is perhaps time for a few home truths to be delivered, and for New Zealand to wake up to the fact that the smash-and-grab raids made to secure its elite talent are not reason to believe its high-performance network is the envy of the world.
New Zealand’s best players get picked off just like other nations’ players do – and the Japanese, French, English and Celtic leagues are just as full of Australians, South Africans, Argentineans, Fijians, Samoans, Tongans and somewhat damagingly to the ego, Georgians.
These leagues operate as commercial entities – professional operations with strategies to procure the best players on the planet, and so Jordie Barrett being signed by Leinster or Fergus Burke being picked up by Saracens is not a universal endorsement of the New Zealand development system, but a sign these two clubs had specific positional needs and the wherewithal and means to identify and secure the respective players they felt were the right fit.
That’s it, and New Zealand needs to wake up to the fact that it’s not the rugby nursery it thinks it is, or once was.
A decade or so ago, New Zealand’s Under-20 side was untouchable – they won the Junior World Championships in consecutive years between 2008 and 2011 – that last team going on to produce three All Blacks a year later in Beauden Barrett, Brodie Retallick and Sam Cane, with another 10 going on to play test rugby shortly after.
The Under-20s would go on to win the title again in 2015 and 2017, but since then the results have fallen off a cliff and New Zealand’s showpiece age-grade team have finished seventh at the last two tournaments.
Jordie Barrett during the Rugby World Cup final against the Springboks. Photo / Photosport
The world has caught up, and it is France, the country whose Top 14 is a veritable league of nations, who have won the last three tournaments, showing perhaps, that heavy importation of overseas talent does not inhibit local junior players, but better them.
Ireland, another nation that judiciously recruits offshore talent to its national-body-owned club sides, finished second last year and is clearly, given its near permanence at the top of the world rankings since 2018, producing a steady flow of high-quality players.
New Zealand can’t continue to argue that a net outflow of talent each year is nothing to worry about because the system will keep replenishing itself.
That’s no longer the case, if it ever were, and there may need to be an acceptance that New Zealand has to get active in the art of recruitment.
Historically the thinking has been that every departure of a relatively experienced player opens the door to an emerging one, and the Hurricanes can point to the storming form of Brayden Iose as a case in point – as he’s exploded into life in the absence of Ardie Savea.
But the Crusaders may counter by highlighting the difficulties they have had replacing Richie Mo’unga, Jack Goodhue and Leicester Fainga’anuku; while the Chiefs didn’t find a No 10 either when Damian McKenzie played in Japan in 2022.
It’s not just that New Zealand’s talent isn’t coming through at the same level as it used to, the depth isn’t there either, and rather than leave the Crusaders to work with a local No 10 next year who is not up to it, surely the argument is there to say that the better move would be for NZR to financially support it in trying to lure a high-profile, foreign, world-class first-five?
Silver Lake, after all, has flooded the game with cash so why not invest some of that in enabling clubs to each make an overseas signing?
Rather than exclusively have Kiwis go offshore to find exposure to new ways of doing things, why not balance things by bringing some overseas talent here?
For the last decade, New Zealand Rugby has been happy to help the profile and commercial value of the Japanese league soar by allowing the elite tier of All Blacks to play there.
Now it is helping boost the value of the United Rugby Championship and Champions Cup by allowing Jordie Barrett to play for Leinster.
But these decisions have damaged the local competition, and it is only fair to ask when is it going to sanction a plan to help boost the commercial value of Super Rugby Pacific?
