Roger Tuivasa-Sheck in action for the New Zealand Warriors during a pre-season match against the Redcliffe Dolphins. Photo / Photosport
The Warriors want in on next year’s Las Vegas extravaganza; Oz supercoach Wayne Bennett could return to haunt Kiwi league officials; Liam Lawson’s X-rated appearance on ‘Drive to Survive’; TV3′s demise will hurt sports coverage
The Warriors have put their hands up to be involved in next year’s National Rugby League double header in Las Vegas.
The NRL has a five-year deal to take the opening round to the United States and is cock-a-hoop after 40,000 plus spectators turned up at the magnificent Allegiant Stadium last weekend.
You can count on all 17 clubs wanting a start in 2025′s double header.
Warriors CEO Cameron George confirmed this week that the club has let the NRL know it wants to be involved.
But I think the chances are slim.
Unless the Wahs can convince the NRL that a flock of Kiwi fans will make the expensive trip Stateside – a tough ask for battling diehard Warriors fans from the west and south of Auckland during a cost-of-living crisis – the club will be passed over.
Plus the NRL is far more interested in Australian TV eyeballs than Kiwis (the double header pulled Oz Fox Sport’s biggest audience for league in the network’s history).
Favourites to headline next season’s Sin City opener will be reigning premiers Penrith Panthers and the Canberra Raiders, who share the nickname of Allegiant Stadium’s NFL tenants, the Las Vegas Raiders. The Melbourne Storm are the other contenders.
Word is the cashed-up Sydney City Roosters, touting that they have American colours of red, white and blue, and the Manly Sea Eagles, who tenuously lay claim to the Eagle being America’s national symbol, are favourites to return.
What to make of the Great NRL Vegas Experiment?
The predictably breathless Australian media coverage (with most of the cash-strapped Oz media outlets getting freebies up there) over-stated the event and while the two games were a reasonable watch, they fell short of being brilliant spectacles.
The Aussies and NRL officials also tried to pull the wool over our eyes by claiming American audiences were besotted with what they saw.
The Stateside TV audience said something entirely different. Despite being on Fox Sport USA’s top channel, the first match between Manly and South Sydney only drew an average audience of 61,000 which then faded to 44,000 for the second game.
Hardly the breakthrough in the American market some were claiming.
The jury is still out on whether, as the Sydney Morning Herald put it, the “Vegas experiment will turn out to be a ridiculously expensive boys’ trip or a venture that will reap financial rewards for decades”.
But you have to admire the ambition.
The NRL is targeting A$200 million in new revenue over the next five years if it can crack a slice of the booming sports-betting market in the US which has been legalised in many states after the Supreme Court overturned legislation banning it.
In a more grounded and realistic assessment, chairman Peter V’Landys told the Herald that “we won’t know the benefits for three to four years.”
“When rugby league has tried to come here before, it never had the technology, the sports betting, that we have now. We have an opportunity now. If we can penetrate the market just 0.01 per cent, that’s tens of millions of dollars.
“It won’t happen overnight, but this is a bloody good start. Success for me is revenue. It’s not a full stadium, it’s revenue that I can put back into the game to grow the game.”
It’s something I noted in last week’s Sports Insider column: New Zealand Rugby has so much it could learn from the NRL’s ability to simply get things done.
At the same time as Vegas hosted the league, rugby’s soulless “Super Round” went down in Melbourne with seemingly more ground staff than spectators.
Still on league, spurned Australian “super coach” Wayne Bennett could yet return to haunt Kiwi officials.
Bennett, a winner of seven NRL premierships, was recently controversially passed over as the Kiwis national coach with the New Zealand Rugby League instead opting for Warriors icon Stacey Jones.
But during a blizzard of interviews on site in Sin City, V’Landys commented on the bid from a South Island consortium for a Christchurch-based club, noting it would almost certainly miss out on the 18th franchise but was well in contention for the 19th or 20th.
He then added an interesting rider, saying the NRL will consult Bennett on who the 19th and 20th teams should be following the expected entry of a Papua New Guinea franchise in 2026.
And he could even be involved with one of them.
“Wayne Bennett will absolutely be consulted,” V’Landys told media. “He is a genius – Wayne is the most valuable source we have got in the game. There’s no point leaving him in the garage.
“Wayne has 40 or 50 years of rugby league knowledge and he would be the perfect person to have involved in setting up an 18th team. We will be relying very heavily on him for his advice and input on expansion.”
When the Brisbane-based Dolphins were admitted to the big league last season, a key condition of their licence was the installation of Bennett as their foundation coach.
Here’s hoping Bennett doesn’t bear a grudge over the Kiwi coaching job!
Kiwi F1 aspirant Liam Lawson has the camera lens focused on him in season six of Netflix’s popular Drive to Survive series - and he doesn’t hold back.
Unlike some of the more sanitised interviews he’s given since being passed over for a 2024 F1 starting berth despite earning points for Red Bull’s second team AlphaTauri last year as a fill-in for injured Aussie veteran Daniel Ricciardo, Lawson called a spade a spade.
“It’s tough knowing that I don’t get the seat even though I’ve beaten a guy that’s getting a seat,” Lawson told the series producers.
“I don’t know how to f***ing answer that honestly because it’s meant to be me, so… Obviously it’s frustrating. There’s a lot of things going on to be honest. I think emotionally and mentally, pretty draining yeah.
“But to be honest, it’s been hard to actually enjoy it. Until I have that security or having that contract for a fulltime seat, it’s hard to really enjoy it.”
Lawson is a key character in episode nine of the latest series which captured his Singapore Grand Prix heroics of last year when he stood in for the injured Ricciardo.
The baby-faced 22-year-old is still a reserve driver for Red Bull’s two teams after the energy-drink giant decided to retain Ricciardo and AlphaTauri’s struggling second driver Yuki Tsunoda, the rival from Japan to whom Lawson was referring.
Lawson comes across impressively in the episode but it’s clear lack of financial backing compared to the Tsunodas of this world is working against him.
Intriguingly, Ricciardo and Tsunoda had a blow-up at last weekend’s 2024 season opener in Bahrain, the Aussie branding the Japanese rookie as a “f***ing helmet” and “immature” after a disagreement over race tactics.
While on Red Bull, don’t think the Christian Horner sexting scandal has gone away despite the world champion team doing its best to get their team boss off the hook.
Red Bull has cleared Horner of any impropriety, but it looks like the father of their three-times world champ Max Verstappen might have other ideas.
Jos Verstappen is a hard doer. He once kicked a young Max out of the family car to walk 7km home after an uninspiring display in a junior race.
Intriguingly, “Jos the Boss” told the Daily Mail just hours after Max’s Bahrain victory that the team “will explode” if Horner is not sacked.
“There is tension here while he remains in position,” Mail Sport quoted Verstappen as saying. “The team is in danger of being torn apart. It can’t go on the way it is. It will explode. He is playing the victim, when he is the one causing the problems.”
Nobody seems to know what Jos has against Horner, but the issue isn’t going away.
Wonder if Drive To Survive will touch the subject or if it’s too hot for them?
The demise of the Newshub operation and loss of four seasoned sports journalists from Stuff in the past week will hit sports coverage in New Zealand hard.
While I think TV3 did not help itself by basing the bulk of its efforts on hour-long TV bulletins screening on a dying linear platform (newspapers and radio have reinvented themselves but TV networks remain stoic in dinosaur-like thinking), the reality is Newshub served the Kiwi sports fan well.
The lack of a rival for TVNZ will affect coverage of the likes of the Warriors, Phoenix and Breakers, as will the culling of Stuff’s sports desk where dedicated journos regularly kept fans of those clubs and sports up to date (the irony being most fans read those news stories on Facebook which continues to rip off the media’s content without paying).
TV3′s fall from influence is unlikely to have an impact on the domestic broadcasting-rights market though.
The network has not been proactive around securing rights for more than a decade now, preferring to dabble with Sky around occasional collaborations such as NRL and State of Origin league coverage.
That will all go by the wayside now as TV3 becomes a sporting wasteland despite the fact that its American owner Warner Bros. Discovery (WMD) is a big player in international sports content.
WMD recently made big headlines in the States after announcing a joint venture with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports and Disney for a new sports streaming app to be launched next year.
Early media coverage predicted the app might draw as many as 20 million subscribers.
But Lachlan Murdoch this week poured cold water on those suggestions, saying his expectation is the app may have 5 million subscribers paying $50 a month after five years.
As noted by American media, that’s not chump change but it’s also far short of industry-transforming.
It also makes you wonder what planet New Zealand Rugby are on in believing they would gain one million subs to their new NZR+ app before the end of last year’s World Cup.
They got 60,000.
The lack of “super” about Super Rugby’s Melbourne round last weekend is the least of Rugby Australia’s (RA) problems in the Victorian capital right now.
Beyond dismal crowds, lack of merchandising and no effort to cater for diversity such as the fans attending the Moana Pasifika-Fijian Drua derby, the whole round reeked of underwhelming.
The sooner the idea of Melbourne trying to emulate the NRL’s “Magic Weekend” is binned, the better. Wellington or Dunedin is a much better option.
There are increasing signs beyond just the impending demise of the Rebels franchise that Melbourne is doomed as a rugby city.
Last week, Australian media revealed an ugly twist in RA’s plans to put the Rebels into liquidation. The Rebels board is fighting those moves and had a big legal win by being granted a 60-day stay.
The Rebels claim RA owes the club A$8 million, including $6m promised during Covid.
This comment from Australia’s The Roar sports newsletter says it all really:
“While Rugby Australia might look the bigger of the two bulls fighting in this paddock, keep in mind the code’s governing body is already dipping into its $80 million overdraft with Pacific Equity Partners to keep the lights on. The thought of being lumped with another $8 million in liabilities will hardly be a sedative nighttime tonic for CEO Phil Waugh - who is rumoured to have recently gone cap in hand to World Rugby.”
Cricket has rich form for producing good, score-settling autobiographies - Ross Taylor’s recent one was a classic of the genre. Fans will be eagerly awaiting a tome from Neil Wagner following the murky terms of his departure from the Black Caps. This week’s claims from Taylor and then Kane Williamson respectively inflamed then hosed down the issue.
Sports Insider is reliably informed from someone very close to the team that should the gritty paceman ever set his thoughts down on paper, the chapter on his exit will focus in particular on captain Tim Southee, coach Gary Stead and the game’s bosses at New Zealand Cricket.
1.) Could any other national team from Australia or New Zealand - including the All Blacks and Oz men’s cricket team - ever sell out 13 matches in a row?
That’s the feat accomplished by Australia’s high-flying women’s soccer team, the Matildas, who crushed Uzbekistan 10-0 in an Olympic qualifier in front of 54,120 fans in Melbourne last week.
It has also shut up the knockers who claim interest in elite women’s sport is a “woke exercise” that won’t last. The team’s star Sam Kerr is attracting the wrong kind of headlines in the UK at the moment, but the attention the Matildas grab on the field suggests this team is building a fan base for the future.
2.) Are you sick of Kiwi rugby officials’ buzz word of “fan-centric” yet?
It’s the new favourite phrase of NZR CEO Mark Robinson and Kiwi Super Rugby bosses who don’t seem to be able to provide a quote without mentioning it.
But it’s hardly new. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos first coined the “fan/customer-centric” concept in 1997.
Nothing like keeping up with the times.
Sir John Kirwan and All Blacks coach Scott Robertson getting their surfing fix at the renowned UrbnSurf wave park in Melbourne last week during the Super Round weekend.
“‘Razor’ and I had a great surf out there on Sunday morning,” ‘J.K.’ told Sports Insider. “He put aside his preferred stand-up paddleboard for a conventional surfboard and we had a ball.
“He goes pretty good too,” added JK of the new national coach’s surfing prowess. Kirwan is bringing a similar surf pool to Auckland.
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