The organisation that runs the Rugby Championship between South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina is known as Sanzar. It has a long history of destructive Machiavellian political manoeuvring.
The ramification of the deep distrust between the member unions is now bearing some very bitter and unwanted fruit.
Over the past two decades Sanzar’s provincial competition, Super Rugby, has suffered multiple changes to both the structure of the competition and the participating teams that have had a devastating effect on the once great competition.
At the beginning of the professional era, Super Rugby was the world’s superior rugby club competition. The matches attracted full stadiums with giant global audiences. The follow-on effect to the participating national teams was that southern hemisphere rugby was globally dominant.
Then, fuelled by self-interest, short term thinking and partisan greed, a number of unnecessary changes to the competition structure were implemented with no thought to the consequences. Complicated conferences were rashly introduced, then with equal speed abandoned. New teams from South Africa, Japan, Australia and Argentina were invited into the competition and as quickly booted out.
Over time the confused rugby public simply lost interest and stopped caring as Sanzar provided a lesson on how to take a highly successful professional sporting competition and smash it into the ground.
The final calamity for Super Rugby occurred last year when the unthinkable happened and the South African franchises headed north into the open arms of the Celts and Italians. This forced the Australians and the Kiwis back into their long and deeply unhappy marriage of mutual distrust.
The finger pointing toward who caused this great fall in the south, from superiority to inferiority, has the twisted digits attached to arthritic rugby fingers aiming firmly at the chest of New Zealand Rugby.
Sources point to them as the main malcontents that forced the Argentinians and the Japanese provinces out, before driving negotiations that were so unacceptable to the South Africans that it triggered a divorce so bitter that their provincial teams up and left – with the Springboks now attempting to move heaven and earth to leave the Rugby Championship and enter the Six Nations. A move that would smash international rugby in the south.
Ironically, in the aftermath of the recent Irish series victory, parts of the Kiwi media blamed the lack of competition from South African teams in Super Rugby as a reason for New Zealand’s defeat.
The New Zealanders have always believed in their own myth that they and the South Africans are rugby’s Jedi Knights and the rest of us just annoying little Ewoks. Yet it would appear that it was the Kiwis whose terms forced the South Africans out of Super Rugby.
The relationship between Rugby Australia and New Zealand Rugby is also highly tenuous. A few weeks ago, the Rugby Australia chairman, Hamish McLennan, rightly stood up to the New Zealanders and warned them that unless their next set of financial negotiations within Super Rugby were conducted in a manner that was more equitable than in the past, Australian rugby would walk away from Super Rugby and conduct their own internal provincial competition. A move that would take trans-Tasman provincial rugby back to a place that it has not seen since the 1980s.
While the entire Australian rugby community’s preference is to keep trans-Tasman Super rugby alive, McLennon’s refusal to be treated as a little brother has, for the first time in a very long time, the entire Australian rugby community firmly packing down with and binding onto Rugby Australia and its chairman.
Of huge strategic importance is the backing of McLennon’s stance by the West Australian resources billionaire and rugby philanthropist, Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forest. Twiggy refinanced the Perth-based Western Force after they were madly cut from Super Rugby.
Before the pandemic, Forest was the backer of a new rugby competition named Rapid Rugby. His organisation had set up teams based across Asia and Australia to participate in this new competition, established to provide an alternate competition for the Western Force.
When the pandemic hit and the borders were closed, Rugby Australia was forced to invite the Western Force back into an internal Australian Super competition.
The silent threat that the Australians are carrying into their negotiations with New Zealand Rugby is that if they walk away from Super Rugby, Rapid Rugby, backed by Forest, can quickly be re-established.
This would undermine the Kiwis’ power base by attracting many New Zealand players into a competition that could include teams from Argentina, Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands plus the Australia Super franchises. All backed by real money from Twiggy’s mega mining conglomeration in Western Australia.
To his great credit, Twiggy has a long history of putting substantial amounts of his money back into his community and his support of Rugby Australia is more than substantial, it is now vital.
The political gulf dividing the nations in this season’s Rugby Championship seems far greater than the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans that separates them geographically.
The pivotal match of the tournament may well be its first when New Zealand take on South Africa in Mbombela. Little known to the rugby world, Mbombela Stadium sits 110km west of the Mozambique border and 330km east of Johannesburg, which is about as distant physically and culturally from the Land of the Long White Cloud as you can get.
Having visited Mbombela many years ago I can promise you, Paris it ain’t.
The fact that Mbombela sits on the Crocodile River suggests – and here please excuse my cynicism – that the South Africans have organised a very public ambush, to heap more pain on the already wounded New Zealanders.
This week former New Zealand World Cup-winning coach Steve Hansen harshly criticised New Zealand Rugby for its lack of public support for their team and its under -fire coach Ian Foster, who has suffered far more public criticism and humiliation than any coach should be forced to endure for a sporting defeat.
Not for the first time, the reaction to defeat by the New Zealand media and their wider rugby community has exposed a deep flaw of character. The treatment of Foster by his own community has been nothing short of shameful. As a coach criticism comes with the badge but the personal vilification he has had to endure is simply not acceptable.
Hansen also said the relationship between the New Zealand players and New Zealand Rugby is at an all time low.
After trampling all over Super Rugby, then alienating every national union in the south and possibly forcing the Springboks north, is it any wonder New Zealand Rugby and its team find themselves isolated and boxed into a corner created by their own self-serving actions?
With such dreadful governance from Sanzar, it is no accident that the northern nations have recovered so much ground on the south. Not even a victory against the Springboks next weekend will solve all of these deep concerns for New Zealand Rugby and Sanzar.
Mbombela Stadium has become the very unlikely venue for a Test match with stakes that have suddenly jumped far beyond just the opening round of the 2022 Rugby Championship.
