Now the Money World Cup has kicked off
Thus the 2011 Rugby World Cup rumbles on here in New Zealand and just as the tournament itself has entered the serious end of proceedings with this weekend’s quarter-finals, so too has a nasty edge needled its way into the off-field business of organising a major global sporting event.
All those relatively harmless shenanigans of a month ago, when some people questioned the wisdom of allowing players to hurl themselves off mountain ledges and bridges attached to slender lengths of elastic, seem like light years away.
Now the knockout stages are here, we are knee deep in politicking and mudslinging. The Pacific Islanders feel bullied, the New Zealand Rugby Union and the International Rugby Board are involved in a war of words, strutting around like peacocks competing for a particularly gorgeous female of the species, and the Kiwis smell a northern hemisphere-led conspiracy against their beloved All Blacks.
What has so exercised the New Zealanders this past week is the suggestion by IRB chief executive Mike Miller that a Rugby World Cup could be staged without them.
“Does the World Cup need the All Blacks? Everyone is replaceable,” Miller said in response to a threat by NZRU chief Steve Tew to withdraw the most famous rugby team on the planet from the 2015 World Cup.
Tew had sparked the furore by saying the NZRU may not be able to afford to send the All Blacks to England in four years’ time unless the IRB changed its financial structure, as it was costing it millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Yet it was Miller’s response that provoked the anger on these shores.
“Inconceivable,” was how All Blacks assistant coach Wayne Smith described the thought of an AB no-show and the letters pages of the New Zealand papers and comments sections of their websites took on a distinctly anti-IRB slant.
There were some naysayers who back rugby’s governing body but for the most part it was more in line with the thoughts of Boyd, typed on the New Zealand Herald website.
“They are money-hungry grabbers who care little about the game,” Boyd said, while on the letters page, Gary Carter from Gulf Harbour called for the entire Southern Hemisphere to secede from the IRB and leave the northerners to carry on with their “boring game and rules to match”.
With New Zealand set to make a €22.5m loss from staging this year’s tournament, the IRB makes more than €173m, according to the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald, Gary may well have a point and when you even get the Australian Rugby Union backing their cousins across the ditch, you know someone has really dropped the ball at the IRB.
Yet that was by no means the only issue for which it has been copping flak this week. The decision to fine Alesana Tuilagi of Samoa and then his brother, England’s Manu Tuilagi, €5,764 apiece for wearing an unapproved sponsor’s mouthguards has been decried as dictatorial.
Former All Blacks captains John Graham and Stu Wilson were quick to criticise the size of the fines and the inconsistency of letting England off the hook for cheating by swapping balls over before conversions.
Graham called the fines “absolutely miles over the top” and “dictatorially precious” while Wilson said: “Letting two England officials get away because it was handled internally is just bull-crap. They blatantly cheated.
“Versus a guy that had a mouthguard sponsor that only a dentist would have been able to pick up two inches from his face.”
And the perception that the two-tier nations such as Samoa were treated differently than the big teams was further fuelled when that country had another player suspended over his Twitter postings on the social media website in which he rounded on the IRB for their “injustices” over unfavourable match scheduling.
That Eliota Fuimaono-Sapulo, a law graduate playing for Gloucester in England, chose to undermine his argument with outrageous hyperbole, comparing the IRB’s scheduling for his team and other “smaller” rugby nations to the holocaust and apartheid, was ill-judged and offensive to the victims of those outrages against humanity. And there are no excuses for further rants following the Samoa-South Africa pool game when Sapulo called Welsh referee Nigel Owens a “racist prick”. If nothing else the outbursts would make any prospective client think twice about hiring him as counsel.
And yet the IRB even blew that public relations skirmish when they banned Sapulo from all rugby for not attending a disciplinary hearing over the comments, even though the player said he was not informed by his union that the hearing was set to take place. Again, the punishment was seen as over the top and Sapulo remains banned until the hearing reopens on October 15.
“Hands up those who think the IRB is a bunch of mean-spirited old farts who use rugby to make heaps of money, and pound anyone for daring to criticise them,” said New Zealand Tai Tokerau MP Hone Harawira.
“He (Sapulo) is a qualified lawyer and an articulate man, he’s passionate about his sport and what he said rings true in the hearts of all New Zealanders who hate seeing the little guys cop it from big bullies, particularly bullies from the northern hemisphere.”
It’s all pretty unseemly and casts a shadow as dark as the Wellington skyline this week over what should be a festival of rugby delight.
Maybe it’s the fact that there’s now a week between games and there are column inches to fill, TV news packages to insert and radio phone-in switchboards to jam. And maybe some good, compelling rugby this weekend, from teams north and south of the equator, can put it all back on track, at least until the IRB drops the ball again.
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