Richard Loe: All those games could be too much of a good thing

Rotation and Graham Henry have a lot to answer for. Part of the reason for the dull rugby in the Air NZ Cup so far is that the provincial coaches have watched Mr Henry and his rotating and have taken it up.

If you look at Canterbury's team against Wellington today, there were seven changes from that which played Counties-Manukau. With all due respect to Counties, Canterbury obviously played some of their second-stringers and the game was not up to much as a result, even though Counties came closer than most thought they would.

So I am not sure that those who are not criticising the format of the Cup have got it right. The NZRU have a problem, all right, but I don't know that it is the format to blame.

Rotation is an obvious villain. So is the fact that our rugby is still being diluted by players heading offshore. I read an interesting article which said there were 130 New Zealand players in France last year. They ran the list and I have to confess I had heard of very few of them.

They focused on an Auckland guy who had made the B team and was not going to crack the A team. He left for France, played there for five or six years and carved out a pretty good professional career for himself.

Those are the kind of players who went to other provinces when they couldn't make the A team in their own union - and many went on to bigger and brighter things.

Refereeing is also a problem. The offside law seems forgotten at times and this also helps to snuff out moves and create errors and drag the quality of rugby down.

And then you come back to that same old problem: too much rugby. There are simply too many games and too many representative teams and it starts at the top and it goes all the way down now. It used to be that the rep season did not start until the club season finished.

Well, that's gone now and the rep season encroaches into the club season and takes the best players out of that level.

At the same time - again from the top down - you have many more players earning jerseys than was previously the case. Professional rugby inevitably means more games and more televised games to get the money-go-round operating. But it also percolates down through other rep sides. Virtually all levels now have things called "development" sides as well.

Canterbury have an under-16 rep team but they also have an under-16 development team. I understand why this is happening but it used to be that the elite got the jerseys and the others aspired to be in that team if they worked hard and trained hard.

So there are more players, playing more games and, in many cases, with less ability than before.

I am like a lot of other New Zealanders - I have three kids all playing sport and there are a lot of other things to do with what free time I have. So I can confess openly that the Canterbury-Otago game is the only Cup game I have attended this season.

I think the NZRU's original wish to downsize the number of teams playing was probably right. But they were howled down and I can also see things from the point of view of Manawatu and Hawkes Bay and Tasman in not wanting to be left out.

I think the format of the Cup has to be left in place for a while to see if it can sort itself out.

But, as for those other problems facing rugby, I do not think that anyone has the answers yet - and that's a worry.