NZRU out of touch

BY PHIL GIFFORD

OPINION: The belated backdown by the New Zealand Rugby Union over the Air New Zealand Cup is no less embarrassing for it being so predictable.

Is there an organisation with less ability to read the public mood, and to see bumps in the road ahead, than the NZRU?

This is a group that was surprised by how fierce the public reaction was to taking 22 All Blacks out of the Super 14 competition in 2007.

The fan base lost then has never been fully recovered.

This is a group that was startled by adverse reaction to the reappointment of the All Blacks coaching group after a botched and failed world cup.

And this a group that is apparently so naive it really believed provincial unions would cheerfully submit to being cut from the top level of the game.

The measure of a good business is being able to anticipate potential traps, and dodge them.

Successful businesses plot one, two or even more years ahead. In the case of the Air New Zealand Cup it looks like the NZRU management and board struggle to look more than a fortnight into the future.

When did it dawn on them they weren't going to have an agreement reached with the players' association in time for 2010?

If they'd read that smarter they could have announced weeks ago no change for next year and avoided the angst, name-calling and wasted time and money that has ensued.

It's too late to blub now that Tasman and Counties Manukau are being little ratbags when they threaten appeals against relegation.

Commonsense suggests that was always going to happen. The NZRU may have the moral high ground in this case, but since when have rugby provinces in this country ever put the nation first, the province second?

Stevie Wonder could have seen that when the provincial unions voted back in May for a 10-team competition (and, by the way, not all did), they probably did so thinking someone else would be the one for the chop.

But as the axe sharpened, and D (for Drop) Day loomed, there was a massive and natural change of heart.

To be fair to the provinces of the four likely to be dropped – Northland, Counties Manukau, Manawatu, and Tasman – Northland was opposed to the 10-team concept back in May, and all four were acutely aware of the fact that, once dropped, there would be no realistic chance of ever being a provincial power again.

There were NZRU board members, too, who knew that being dropped from the top tier wasn't so much demotion as death.

All the more reason, you might have thought, for not only stepping carefully through a political minefield, but keeping all your mates informed every step along the way.

Yet an official at one of the unthreatened provinces swears that, in the four weeks before December 10, the only information he and his union had on developments was what they read in newspapers or heard on radio.

As one example of how bad communication was in the NZRU, it might have been nice if All Black coach Graham Henry had been told before he got back from Europe that headquarters had undergone a change in attitude.

Then he would have been able, when quizzed about the Air New Zealand Cup on his return to, quite reasonably, dodge the issue, instead of following the old 10-team party line, which made him look both ill-informed and mean-spirited.

Despite community fundraising in Manawatu, a 35,000-signature public petition, and threats of legal action, there was no quick footwork from the NZRU as the ground shifted.

As late as the end of October, Steve Tew (and to be fair he was only echoing the views of the board) was still talking up the benefits of the 10-team comp, and how it was the only sensible choice.

Disaster is not a word that should ever be applied to sport, so let's call the current public relations pile-up by the NZRU a blooper.

The way it has been handled has seen some big city unions sneer at the rural unions, who weirdly enough, can boast much more supportive fan bases than their city cousins.

As just one example of the big city blues, Canterbury has decided to slash ticket prices by up to a third just to get fans back to the games.

Many officials and fans in threatened unions now regard the NZRU with the same warmth the average Kiwi bloke feels towards an appointment with a proctologist. Just what we need as we head towards being a stadium of four million people in 2011.

Cleaning up the mess left behind, you feel, will take way more lateral thinking, and diplomacy, from the NZRU than we've seen this year.

- © Fairfax NZ News