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fans as greats turn off Super Rugby
A huge shift is unfolding in the land of the long white cloud as rugby diehards — and some legends — turn to league. DYLAN CLEAVER examines the trend and what it means for NRL expansion.Dylan Cleaver
6 min read
June 17, 2023 - 6:00AM
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Is rugby on the nose in New Zealand?
There’s a famous Sports Illustrated cover from 1994 that, let’s be brutally honest, hasn’t aged very well.
Still, you can only report what you see at the time so, in the wake of the New York Rangers stunning 4-3 Stanley Cup finals series win over the Vancouver Canucks — game seven was the most-watched sports programme in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation history — SI provocatively ran with: “Why the NHL’s Hot and the NBA’s Not.”
If you were to cast a similar lens over the New Zealand sports scene right now, you would be well within your rights to come up with a parallel headline.
Why the NRL’s Hot and Super Rugby’s Not.
Don’t take my word for it.
Listen instead to Steve Hansen, arguably the most successful All Blacks coach in history and a man whose zeal for the 15-man code borders on the religious.
Lately, however, his faith has been tested.
Former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen has given a frank assessment of rugby. Picture: Hannah Peters/Getty Images.
“It can be hard to watch at times,” Hansen said in a widely shared and reported on radio interview while stating that over the past five years rugby union had become markedly slower. “There’s no dispute that Super Rugby has to change.
“It’s pretty predictable and still stuck where it was four or five years ago. You go through [last weekend’s] quarter-finals and it wasn’t that exciting as you knew who was going to win.”
Stunningly, he followed that sacrilege with blasphemy.
League, and more specifically the NRL, “is a better game to watch on TV than rugby is, because it’s not stop-start.
“They apply a lot of common sense to how they adjudicate things and make sure the game keeps some form of flow to it.”
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If it was just Hansen, you could pass it off as the thing-were-better-in-my-day rantings of a disaffected former New Zealand Rugby (NZR) employee, but it turns out he’s just the latest in a line of luminaries who have become fed up with rugby’s predictability.
Much of the frustration boils down to the crudely effective but stultifying strategy of waiting for an inevitable penalty, kicking for touch and employing a maul to force another penalty or a lineout-drive try.
It’s wickedly hard to defend and many teams are reluctant to try too hard to do so knowing that referees are prone to handing out yellow cards as enthusiastically as Jehovah’s Witnesses hand out pamphlets.
The Warriors and NRL are winning over fans in New Zealand.
Wayne Smith, who last year coached the Black Ferns to World Cup success after a stellar career as All Blacks assistant coach during the reigns of Graham Henry and Hansen, created ripples when he admitted to switching off a Super Rugby game in favour of watching a documentary on the lions of the Serengeti.
“I’m frustrated with the game,” Smith said.
“I watched the game that Nic Berry refereed the other day, and his arm is out the whole time. Every single play, there’s an advantage.
“Then, you know, we’re going to go seven, eight phases and if it goes nowhere, we’re going to come back and it’s going to be a penalty. Then, 30 seconds to kick the ball and another 40 seconds for the lineout to happen.
“It’s going to be a drive that’s going to collapse, and it’s going to be an arm coming out.
Dallin Watene-Zelezniak celebrates a try for the Warriors.
“It’s going to come back to another penalty. Kick to touch, another drive. Then a yellow card comes out because they do it again… it’s not the sort of game I want to watch at the moment.”
Justin Marshall, the robust former halfback turned broadcaster, also confessed to having become so bored by one Super Rugby game that he turned over to watch… the league!
This is not normal: like the strictest of Mafia codes, rugby people rarely, if ever, attack rugby.
The negative commentary is by no means confined to these three and when you meld this to the fact the resurgent Warriors attracted a full house of close to 24,000 at Mt Smart for their last home game against the Dolphins, whereas the Blues could only attract 12,000 to cavernous Eden Park for their Super Rugby playoff against the Waratahs, there is a genuine sense that New Zealanders are turning off union and switching on league.
Warriors star Shaun Johnson.
Not everything is quite as it seems, however.
While Sky TV, the broadcast partner of NZR and the exclusive New Zealand provider of the NRL, does not make its ratings public an executive speaking under anonymity said that the Warriors impressive victory over Canberra last weekend rated well below any of the four Super Rugby playoffs.
Domestically, league is an afterthought.
Once-proud metropolitan club competitions are pale imitations of what they once were; the 13-man code has no foothold in schools; and in Auckland, the country’s biggest city and the biggest hotbed of young Pasifika talent, playing numbers have fallen off a cliff, with Sport New Zealand statistics showing that participation in rugby league has declined faster than any sport in the past 10 years, with a whopping drop of 23 percent among males.
Looking at those numbers it might seem counterintuitive but Tony Kemp says there has never been a better time for the NRL to announce that its 18th franchise will be based in New Zealand.
“It’s a no-brainer,” says the former Newcastle Knights and Kiwis standoff who also coached the Warriors.
“It should have really been given to New Zealand before the Dolphins.
“People point to the fact there is a lack of structured rugby league in New Zealand and a lack of players, but we don’t need to think in those narrow terms. Instead, look at it as ‘oval-ball’ talent.”
Kemp said New Zealand had an awesome pool of oval-ball talent and pointed to the likes of Benji Marshall and Shaun Johnson’s talent being identified in touch and any number of players who come through the country’s pumped-up 1st XV schools scene.
“New Zealand is such an important recruiting ground and the NRL knows that,” Kemp says, describing the country’s talent pool as akin to western Sydney but even deeper.
The All Blacks’ greatest threat might come from their own backyard.
There is concern that the NRL’s enthusiasm for a second New Zealand franchise might be waning, with the jungle drums beating for another Queensland-based team, potentially one in Perth or, perhaps most radically, an Australian government-backed venture in Papua New Guinea, a geopolitical move to curb Chinese influence in the region that even captured the imagination of the Washington Post.
That would be a mistake, says Trevor McKewen, the former Warriors CEO who also worked as an executive for Super League and New Zealand Rugby.
In a recent column for Business Desk, McKewen wrote: “Almost half of every NRL club is made up of Aotearoa and Polynesian-heritage players. New Zealand is the second-biggest broadcasting market the NRL has. Christchurch is crying out for a second anchor tenant alongside the Crusaders at the shiny new indoor stadium to be built.”
Wayde Egan of the Warriors (R) celebrates a try with Dallin Watene-Zelezniak.
Christchurch is where Kemp would look first, too, even pushing the idea of a joint venture between the remnants of the North Sydney Bears and the owners of the Crusaders, the powerhouse Super Rugby franchise that is on track for a 12th title having qualified for the final next week.
The red-and-black symmetry would be too neat and the ability to “cross-pollinate” ideas and share resources between the teams could have lasting benefits for both codes.
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