Yachting: Team of zombies not the answer to retaining America's Cup

By Murray Deaker

There is only one thing harder than winning the America's Cup and that is defending it. Only the United States has ever staged successful defences.

The Aussies couldn't. The prospect of us achieving something in sport that our transtasman neighbours found too tough should be more than enough motivation for Team New Zealand today.

This is more than just a yacht race. This is one way this little nation can show to the world not only values such as determination, perseverance and passion that have lifted its top sportsmen to positions of status far beyond reasonable expectations but also the expertise, ingenuity, commitment and professionalism that have enabled some small New Zealand businesses to compete in the global economy.

This is about saying us saying, "here we are, a tiny little dot on the map with just three and half million people but ignore us at your peril."

It is about barbed wire inventiveness, underdogs, black boats, red socks, old-fashioned values and new age technology.

It is about us. Warts and all. This week's headlines of a rift in Team New Zealand says more about our national trait of criticising our heroes so they don't ever think they are any better than the rest of us than it does about either the team's harmony or its chances of success.

There has been talk, rumour, innuendo and gossip about difficulties and differences in Team New Zealand for the past five years.

When I asked Sir Peter Blake in a radio interview more than a year ago whether there was a rift in the camp or not he responded then as he has this week.

It is obvious that in any group of 80 ambitious, highly motivated, energetic, enthusiastic individuals there will be scraps, arguments, debate and disputes. You put 80 zombies together and that won't happen. Team Zombie won't win the America's Cup either.

Team New Zealand will. Without the debate, the discussions, the disputes it wouldn't have even got close. Progress in any area of human endeavour happens only when the boundaries are pushed to the edge, when disagreements become the catalyst for development.

It is not the Kiwi style to sit around subserviently agreeing with every harebrained scheme that the bosses come up with. We like to stick our sixpence's worth in, have our say because we've always thought we knew as much as the next bloke. That is why when we get it right we are unbeatable because we are a real team.

Great teams leave their differences in the dressingroom. We are about to find out whether Team New Zealand is great or just another group of individuals going through the motions without having a real hard edge. My belief is that Team New Zealand has got its act together.

At the Halberg Trust awards John Walker said that success was about working hard, continuing to work harder and then working harder still. We have already seen the evidence of how hard some elements of Team New Zealand have worked.

Sir Peter and his marketing and fundraising group have pushed to get every last dollar out of an already stretched economy. Obviously they've done a tremendous job because amidst all the rumours there has never once been a complaint from the sailors that there has been insufficient funding for testing, for new sails, for the latest equipment or for anything else to make the boat go faster.

Now we are about to discover whether Tom Schnackenberg and his design team have come up with a boat quick enough to give Russell Coutts and his sailing team a chance to compete with the best Italy can throw at them.

Finally, only Coutts and the blokes on the Black Boat know if they have done the hard work to turn that chance into success. What they should know is that they take a little bit of all of us with them but we're not going for the free ride. We're behind the Black Boat blowing until our lungs burst.

* Murray Deaker is the host of Radio ZB's Sportstalk.