Gregor Paul: Why New Zealand needs to save Australian rugby

The Wallabies would surely love more chances to break their Eden Park hoodoo. Photo / Photosport

OPINION:

Back in 1995, when rugby turned professional and was split into distinct blocs, New Zealand felt fortunate to be located so close to Australia.

It was obvious even then that geography was going to have a huge bearing on who would end up being successful.

In this new world, there would be cross-border club competitions and as much as New Zealand needed to have its own house in order, so too was it imperative that its Super Rugby partners Australia and South Africa quickly get their act together.

No one could afford for their neighbour to be a basket case because ultimately their weaknesses would become those of the collective bloc and there was an almost overwhelming relief, bordering on smugness in the Southern Hemisphere, that geography had been a blessing.

Australia was arguably the smartest and most innovative rugby nation on the planet back then – capable of making their meagre resources go an awfully long way and the Wallabies won two World Cups in the same decade.

England, by way of contrast, must have been dismayed that they found themselves surrounded by the hapless Scots to the North and the bickering Welsh to the West.

When they looked across the Irish Sea, things looked equally bleak and part of the reason it has taken an age for the North to assert itself as the premium rugby hemisphere is that its strongest nations have been hampered by the weakest.

But now that the South Africans have joined the Celts and the Italians’ club competition, and global superstars have poured into the French and English leagues, standards have risen across the board and everyone has benefitted.

That Ireland and France sit on top of the world rankings is as much a testament to the growth of Italy and Scotland as it is to the ingenuity and hard work of the two leading nations themselves.

And equally, the All Blacks currently sit third in the world and have endured a turbulent last few years partly because of the decline of Australia.

If geography was initially a blessing at the dawn of the blessing age, it has now become a curse for New Zealand as it has found itself stuck next to a basket case.

Dalton Papali'i and Akira Ioane held their own against a formidable Wallabies pack. Photo / Photosport

The optimism of being partnered with Australia has been replaced with a sense of bitterness and dread because it increasingly feels like rugby there is in terminal decline, likely to have the profile of underwater hockey by the end of the decade if anyone is still playing by then.

Australia have become Homer Simpson to New Zealand’s Ned Flanders – constantly hitting up their neighbour for players, money, and concessions in the way Super Rugby is run.

They have to do this because they signed a terrible broadcast deal a few years ago and now, even though they are drowning in debt, they have found exorbitant sums to tempt a 19-year-old NRL superstar to switch codes.

Rugby Australia may be optimistic about the future, and the recent signings of Eddie Jones and Joseph Suaalli have led to yet more bombastic statements from HQ, but everyone in New Zealand can see those for what they are – headline-grabbing plays which fail to deal with the core problem of not having either the financial or personnel resources to operate five teams.

New Zealand has been stuck in the same dilemma for the last decade, of wanting to support its nearest neighbour’s ambition to run five professional teams, but never seeing any evidence it can do it.

In 2020, New Zealand Rugby even made a bold intervention to reshape Super Rugby with only three Australian teams in it.

But it failed and what’s clear is that Australia can’t stand up to its own hubris and is plagued by a determination to run five teams no matter the cost or implications.

Equally clear is that in this particular case, time will not prove to be the great healer and magically fix the Rebels, Force, Reds and Waratahs.

They were all a bit weak and feckless six years ago, and nothing has changed. No one believes the second coming of Australian rugby is nigh and New Zealand, of course, has seen for itself during the brief existence of Super Rugby Aotearoa that it can’t go it alone.

It can, therefore, continue to look across the Tasman and shake its head, grumbling at the collective lack of hardness and accuracy they see each week, while cursing their bad luck that of all the places New Zealand had to be located, it was smack in the middle of the Pacific, next to a rugby gronk.

But that woe is me attitude serves little to no purpose. New Zealand can’t be picked up and moved off the coast of Ireland and welcomed into the heavyweight European competitions.

Geography can’t be changed or denied and so NZR’s only real choice if it is to save Super Rugby from the not so-slow, painful death it is dying, is to embrace a full-scale rescue plan of Australian rugby.

However cruel fate, or tectonic plates have been, New Zealand has to accept that it’s not some abstract theory that its rugby fate is inextricably linked to that of Australia’s, but an undeniable fact.

New Zealand is stuck with Australia and the time has come to like that fact again, rather than wish it weren’t true.

NZR already gives Rugby Australia $7m of its TV income and it has agreed to the silly eight-team play-off format to give the old foe a fighting chance of having two teams make the knock-out rounds.

But why not then succumb to all sorts of ideas - such as changing the All Blacks eligibility laws to allow New Zealanders to play for Australian clubs.

Why not let the Aussies have their pick of some of New Zealand’s emerging talent – the sorts who will likely spend a season barely playing for their Kiwi Super Rugby club but would be a regular started for the Force, Waratahs, Reds or Rebels.

And surely there is some way that more Australians can be funnelled into the Bunnings Cup?

If smart rugby people put their minds to it, they could come up with all sorts of new ways to help Australia get stronger: initiatives to swap IP, to let player traffic flow between the two countries without resentment and accusation.

But first everyone in New Zealand must accept that it is in their own best interests to do so.