Gregor Paul: Rugby today is better than ever - but there’s one big problem

OPINION:

It seems like everyone is queuing up these days to put the boot into rugby: to warn that it has lost its essence, that it has been usurped by the NRL as the more entertaining football code and that it needs a global reset to reposition itself as a fan-friendly sport.

Slagging rugby off and lamenting its demise has almost become a sport itself with media coverage this week split 50:50 between analysing what could be two classic Super Rugby semifinals and warning that the game is facing an existential crisis.

Both story strands are strangely true as rugby is simultaneously facing – beginning this weekend – a brilliant next few months and yet also a truly bleak long-term future.

Now that Super Rugby Pacific is down to the four best teams, everything is in place for the sport to use its complexity as its trump card.

Now that the best have found themselves playing against the best, this is when the strategic breadth of rugby makes it a significantly more compelling game than rugby league.

Rugby’s genius is that it has found a way to keep its set pieces as the jewel in its crown. Scrums and lineouts compel teams to build different shaped athletes and it’s this which gives it the advantage in the battle for fans against the one-size-fits-all NRL.

What makes rugby so special, and the semifinals so intriguing, is that the key battle in Christchurch will be in the front row of the scrum between the 144kg Tamaiti Williams and the 120kg Nepo Laulala.

Tamaiti Williams of The Crusaders in action against Moana Pasifika. Photo / Photosport

In Hamilton, it will be between the 80kg Damian McKenzie and the 80kg Nic White as the two playmakers try to exert their influence.

A sport that can make heroes out of both David and Goliath is one that will forever attract an audience, and whereas rugby league offers run, pass and kick, rugby union does all that plus scrum, lineout, ruck and maul.

But while rugby’s complexity is its greatest strength, too often it is also its greatest weakness because the game’s executive class have picked away at some of the laws like a loose thread and unravelled the fabric.

The sport has needed bold and consistent leadership to evolve an archaic lawbook to make it more relevant to the speed, size and power of the modern athlete and to enable the complexities of rugby to enthral fans rather than confuse and frustrate them.

Instead, it has had internecine conflict between the hemispheres, which has led to haphazard rule tinkering and illogical thinking underpinned by an angst around ongoing legal action related to head injuries.

The staggering ineptitude is best illustrated by the inability of administrators to create a clear role and boundary for technology to assist in officiating, and by the unfathomably maddening variation between the two hemispheres in how to use red cards.

What other major sport with global ambitions is played under different laws and different interpretations of the same laws depending where in the world it is played?

This should be rugby’s golden age. The athletes have never been so well conditioned, so skilled and the coaches armed with so much intel and high-performance resource.

Go back 40 years and rugby was pretty much a glorified fistfight in the mud, with a couple of skinny blokes in the backline kicking the leather off the ball.

Now it has supreme athletes across the park, 23 players in each team who can pass and catch and immaculate surfaces that enable the game to be played on top of the ground.

And yet, for all the inherent advantages the game possesses, it too frequently descends into a confused mess of pedantic rulings and TMO interference all because no one with the power to fix what is broken neither has the ability nor the desire to put things right.

Ardie Savea reacts as referee Nic Berry blows for fulltime. Photo / Getty

What happens is that we reach the semifinals of Super Rugby Pacific and fans have lost confidence in the product – or more accurately they have lost faith in the highly-paid administrators who consistently fail to agree on something so simple and establish a uniform means of officiating that makes sense to everyone.

That fans can’t shake their nostalgia for a bygone era which was nowhere near as great as everyone remembers is the greatest indictment on the current game.

This inability to create a unified and sensible set of laws is merely the tip of the massive iceberg threatening to render rugby a sporting irrelevance.

Rugby seemingly has endless issues, but really it only has one – poor leadership and weak governance, both of which have led to a systemic failure to put fans at the centre of all decision-making.

So many decisions get made, not because they are good for fans, but because they score minor victories in the boardroom where egos are large yet fragile and the most valuable currency is one-upmanship.

This is why Super Rugby ended up looking like Mr Potato Head between 2011 and 2019, why the competition was blown up in 2020 and why an agreement made between New Zealand and Australia last year is suddenly being revised.

How patently the administration of Southern Hemisphere rugby is not fit for purpose came yesterday when Sanzaar issued a statement effectively rubbishing claims made by its own chair Hamish McLennan.

McLennan suggested that New Zealand is the only one of the Sanzaar partners opposed to a proposed change to the timing of the Rugby Championship.

That intel marries with what the Herald has been told and yet Sanzaar, with no hint of irony, contradicted its own chairman and apologised for the confusion he’d supposedly caused.

It’s no wonder in a week when the focus should be exclusively on the two upcoming games, media, fans and former players and coaches can’t help but fear for the future of the sport.

Rugby could become compelling all the time and not just some of the time if it could find leaders who were less driven by a Lady Macbeth desire for power and get on with each other for long enough to sit in the same room and agree one simple, unified set of laws.