Speaker: Apathy is where the heart is
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HG,
One difference between soccerball and rugby now is that, although there are all these different cups, it is the same club sides that play in them. Here the only example of the same side playing in different competitions is the NPC and Ranfurly Shield.
So now, I'm expected to get in behind the Canes for 3 months (even though it involves Palmerston Nth) then the All Blacks for a bit, then Wellington for a few months, until they take out all the best players for the business end, and then they exepct me to get in behind the All Blacks again.
Then it's Xmas, and then I'm expected to do it all again.
Tiring.
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I suppose that's the way to look at that example. Each fan is a fan of one team and they follow that team each week rather than the entire league.
In Scotland if you aren't a Rangers or Celtic fan you're just trying to come third all season. In the Premier League you're trying to win the title, or get a UEFA Cup spot, or avoid relegation etc.
But yeah, the population of 50 million in the UK kind of keeps that giant beast rolling along. If there were 50 million people in NZ tickets for Super 14 games would probably be as scarce as likeable politicians.
When I was living in Korea I supported a K-League team and one season they had a ridiculous 44 game regular season in a competition with no relegation and not much to play for at the top end either aside from the title (no playoffs) and the crowds dwindled like hell by the middle to latter stages.
It's best to just keep things simple and stable at the end of the day I guess. Despite the drop off in crowd numbers though in NZ they aren't TOO bad given the mood of the nation and the silly competitions that people are forced to watch to get their fix.
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That's an interesting thought Legbreak.
I hadn't considered the ramifications of changing the team you support as I always saw it as "scaling up" (Club to Province to Region/Super 14 to Nation).
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Scaling up is one thing, to do it in such a regimented way gets me.
It's a bit Orwellian for my liking. Who are we at war against this month again?
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Paul: the TV timeouts are relatively new in American football. A couple of minutes to restart after each score; a timeout at 2 minutes before the end of each half and the division of the game into quarters (with a stoppage). All of these things help TV stations who want to show the games, as you can tell your advertisers that their ads will be shown during the game.
NHL Ice Hockey has TV timeouts midway through each (there are three in a game) period. There's it's absolutely a case of the game fitting around TV's need for advertisers. Ice hockey has very long breaks between the periods to allow the ice to be groomed, so they try not to put too many adverts in that break to stop the audience channel surfing, and therefore demand to fit them in during the actual game.
I agree about afternoon games. It is really hard to take children - future fans - to matches that don't finish to close to 10pm. There should be a better mix.
I don't buy this anymore. I think the biggest problem with rugby is the idea that it needs to be played Friday - Sunday. Why would you only use 3/7 of the week to play a game? With all the crap TV that's on during the week, and people actually having their own sport and fun activities on the weekend, night time is the best time to watch sport on the television. I can't think of many sports that are exclusively weekend sports at the professional level. Basketball, ice hockey, soccer, cricket all play sport all week. Rugby, rugby league, and American Football seem to view the sporting week as only consisting of Friday - Monday. Why couldn't the Air NZ cup be a midweek competition, two games a night, one starting at 6, the other at 8?
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Now we get 15 weeks of Super 14, 6 home tests and then about 12 weeks of ANZ Cup. So about the equavalent of 33 weeks of professional rugby on our shores. Throw in the Sevens weekend as well, and Pay TV showing Currie Cup, Heinekin Cup etc, and all the while club rugby is still trucking along in the background and we get exactly that watered down feel for the game. The interest is still there as stated in the original post but the passion has been eroded big time.
I think the problem is that we've built a structure which has four levels (club, NPC, super 14, All Blacks) which has four levels, three of which are professional, in a country of 4 million people. If we had 10 million that might be fine, but there's just not the population, sponsorship, numbers of people to attend rugby to support that. If the NPC returned to a semi-amateur competition (retainers etc), and the whole season got shorted by two months by playing it at the same time as the super 14 - during winter, which is when rugby is meant to be played - it'd be living within its means.
Currently it's running a structure similar to the NFL, NHL, NBA etc, which are sports that have more than four million amateur _players_, and tens of millions of fans to prop it up.
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Good points Kyle. By running the NPC alongside the Super 14 they could actually use it to put fringe players in, or guys coming back from injury, or pull guys up from it. Almost pretty much every professional football team worth their salt has. The NFL has the Canadian league, the EPL has reserve teams, the NRL has reserve teams and under 20 teams, the Major League Baseball teams have their minor league and farm teams which players come and go from during a season. Even our provincial cricket teams have club sides that players are pulled from.
As it stands if a guy is out of form or injured in the Super 14 then they just sit on the sideline and wait for their chance to play. Some would go right through the Super 14 and accumulate an hour or two of football in 13 weeks. Having one or two provincial teams for them to drop into would suit the coaches I'm sure and mean there's no need to rotate players because they could simply get games in the NPC side and the top side could be fielded week after week until injury. The way sport was meant to be played.
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Oh yeah, there's one downside though.
Club football will be eroded further.
They will not have their Super 14 players ever (although since expansion to 14 teams and an early start that doesn't occur now anyway, I was watching Nick Williams, Anthony Tuitavake and George Pisi playing for Massey seniors a couple of years ago), and they will not have access to their NPC players which will now of course be the next tier down.
Whereas in the 80s you would have All Blacks running round in club jerseys for probably a dozen club games a year on a good year, you now only get half of your NPC squad for most of the year if you are lucky. Soon you won't even get that.
On the surface that might not seem like a big deal but remember, clubs are the heart and soul of the game so they will need to be careful how they spread round the pie to those clubs since their crowds will get smaller and their bar takings suffer further. Not to mention even less sponsorship.
I tell you what would be interesting. If clubs started contracting players and saying they will sell them to a Super 14 team for $200,000. The NZRU would kick them out of whatever competition they are in but since these clubs spend a lot of time and money bringing players through the ranks and turning them into very good footballers they deserve more than a "thanks guys, we'll take him now". And I doubt they even get that.
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Club football will be eroded further.
I'm starting to develop the belief that this isn't true. Or at least, not necessarily true. I think people should actually say "Club football will be changed forever".
If people want to watch club football, good on them. But they're not the top level, or the next level down, so they're not going to get crowds in the thousands - few hundred around the sideline should be a good crowd for most games.
And financially they should be getting the flowdown from the top level. Clubs should be getting money from NPC teams, and if NPC owns the super 14, a strong financial super 14 franchise should see money coming down to them for their jerseys and bus hire and equipment and so forth.
And if the all blacks are worth umpteen million, and bring in X money by playing a big international, but can only play... say 30 games a year. Why would you have them playing club rugby? If they play no club rugby, but more games internationally as all blacks, rugby in nz will be in a better financial position. There's no financial value in having dan carter running around with his club team. Unless there's value in it for Dan Carter (eg, recovering from injury, fitness, game time etc) why would you do it?
And I don't follow club rugby at all, but by logic I would say that professionalism has made club rugby stronger in NZ. Professionalism has made rugby players much fitter, generally more skilled, and has improved their ability to play as a team. In order to break into that, amateur players playing at the club level need to be better. Yes there are less players and less teams now but that's not affecting the quality of our rugby at the end result. It's been 13 years since professionalism, which is a over a generation in sporting terms, and we're still the best rugby nation in the world.
I think club rugby needs to be thought of differently. It's the training ground for players going up, or those on the fringe of provincial. It's age grade rugby for younger players. It's social rugby for the less skilled. I fail to see why any of this requires All Blacks out on the field.
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//and we're still the best rugby nation in the world.
no we're not, we are just not. You and Jock need to admitt it to yourselves then maybe the game in this country can move forward.
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no we're not, we are just not. You and Jock need to admitt it to yourselves then maybe the game in this country can move forward.
Well, actually not at present, I think we're #2 and South Africa are number 1? But over the 13 years since professionalism came in, NZ would be ranked #1 in the world more than any other country. And certainly in the three years leading up to the world cup.
If you want to use other measures like - nz players in demand overseas for big money, marketing, branding, image, grassroots, age grade vs other countries, I think in most of them we'd still be top.
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Kyle, I didn't say All Blacks should play club rugby but as someone who actually DOES watch club rugby from time to time I know that there are a lot of Super 14 players (or at least were) until recently pulling on the boots. And there have certainly been ANZ CUP players playing a lot of club football at least up until the moment.
Those are the players that I am talking about and it's them that DO attract quite a few people to games.
They won't play club football anymore. I watched the Massey Premiers a few times a couple of years ago and with Nick Williams and Anthony Tuitavake playing they got a few folks along. Now without them last year they got about two-thirds as many along.
This may not seem like much when you translate it into say 50 less people but if 15 of them were going to go into the club and spend $20 each that works out at $300 less dollars a weekend for the club.
That's all hypothetical of course but for most clubs a few hundred bucks here and there means a lot. Especially when so many have been struggling for years.
Playing numbers in NZ used to be about 200,000, now they are closer to 130,000 (the last figure I heard). That's not all due to rugby going professional but 99.9% of our players are playing club or school rugby and so if numbers have dropped like that then the amount of money from club fees has taken a pretty substantial cut.
In Auckland there were 21 clubs in about 1994 or thereabouts. Since then Bay Lynn folded into Suburbs, Grammar and Carlton merged resulting in a significant drop off in team numbers immediately, and this year Eden and Roskill merged, and Mt Wellington and Te Papapa have merged, while Waiheke and Tamaki appear unable to field senior teams in the new cut down 16 team single division.
Having watched senior teams 10-15 years ago and watched them now the standard is very clearly lower. Even watching the Gallaher Shield final in the last few years the quality of the games and players is fairly average considering they are the best club players and teams in Auckland.
One other thing that has exploded in recent times is average club players leaving to go and play in the northern hemisphere for lower tier clubs as well. That hasn't helped the clubs much either.
It all works out nicely if those players eventually come back to the clubs to play or coach, but if they don't serious damage is done. And the money filtering down from the NZRU may be reasonable but when they start running at a loss (and NPC teams are haemorraging money in many cases) what then?
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Kyle, I didn't say All Blacks should play club rugby but as someone who actually DOES watch club rugby from time to time I know that there are a lot of Super 14 players (or at least were) until recently pulling on the boots. And there have certainly been ANZ CUP players playing a lot of club football at least up until the moment.
Oh, super 14 players too.
I suspect you could find enough room in the season for the club season, and Air NZ Cup to not completely cross over, so that an amateur player on a professional retainer could do both.
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Yeah, the ANZ CUP players would definately play some club games. At the moment they play close to all of them because the Cup doesn't start until after the club finals or thereabouts.
But their idea is that it will run alongside the Super 14 (which essentially runs all season (for 20-25 weeks including pre season and playoffs) and that would mean that it's on at the same time as the club comps.
ANZ CUP would presumably run for about 10 weeks and then playoffs. It will likely lose money (or generate nothing anyway) as next to nobody will go to watch it.
The NZRU is going to have to negotiate a seriously awesome TV deal with whatever international or Super 10, 12, 14 ... games they come up with.
It's really going to be depressing otherwise for clubs to have their playing numbers fall, their best 2, 3, 4 players gone, their spectator numbers fall, their bar takings fall and in general their club to become quieter and their identity eroded and then the NZRU or the ARU or whoever say, here's a cheque for $10,000 to keep existing so we can take some more of your players next year.
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