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New Zealand Rugby Has A Big Problem. So Why Are Its Most Powerful Voices Still Silent?

STEVE HANSEN. PHOTO: GETTY

The events of this week have cast a shadow across New Zealand rugby, with the despicable behaviour of one of its most beloved teams shocking the nation. But, Steve Hansen aside, its most prominent voices have stayed silent. Why?

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In US sports they have this nickname, “America’s Team”. Initially bestowed upon the dominant Dallas Cowboys team of the 80s, it’s latterly come to be attached to any team which seems to embody the aspirational national character – and notwithstanding all the deeply fucked up things happening in America, the idea that certain teams at certain moments can acquire a meaning beyond the arena in which they do their work has a resonance.

To me, over the past five years or so, the Chiefs were New Zealand’s team. Assembled from pieces who’d failed to find a home at other franchises, or been judged not good enough, they coalesced into something awe-inspiring on the field, winning championships playing with a kind of passionate recklessness. Compared to some of our more famous teams, the Chiefs took risks, screwed up and came back to win anyway. They were led by people who seemed of matchless character, too – from coaches Dave Rennie and Wayne Smith (who nearly quit the All Blacks after a particularly ugly drinking session in South Africa) to senior players like Liam Messam and Sonny Bill Williams.

The point is that they were easy to romanticise, to view as a different and more modern version of the New Zealand rugby archetype. Then this week happened, and all that went out the window. Over a series of devastating interviews conducted with RNZ and Story a woman named Scarlette describes a terrifying ordeal in which a group of big, strong, drunk men repeatedly touched her, licked her, grabbed her vagina and ignored her protestations and increasingly violent resistance. At the end, after all they’d put her through, they short-changed her.

As Amanda Gillies said during Scarlett’s chilling interview on Story, “that’s a sexual assault”. It is, and police are investigating – though, in a too familiar refrain, Scarlette is ambivalent about pursuing a complaint through that avenue, given her experience with them in the past.

This is a known organisational problem for the police, one they’re working through. But this situation is a new and immense problem for rugby. Already it’s metastasising within the Waikato, with a stripper hired for a prior team event describing similarly degrading and potentially illegal behaviour

The incidents are manifestly despicable. It’s the kind of behaviour you instinctively know exists in the seldom-visited corridors of our collective national history. The blind eye of generations of sportswriters toward this kind of behaviour is the stuff of legend – players were indulged and their actions never considered for reporting due to an unspoken jock-sniffing compact which existed between reporters and their subjects.

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Thankfully a different generation of journalists within and without of sports has jettisoned that attitude along with thousands of other unwritten rules which often poisoned life for those who weren’t the dominant gender and ethnicity in this country. It’s still a mess, but at least we’re not pretending it doesn’t exist.

As ugly as this moment is, and potentially criminal as those actions are, the fact it’s the single story gripping the nation is indicative of an evolution in the code of both society and sports: this shit will not stand any longer. The response of both Andrew Flexman and Gallagher’s Margaret Comer earlier in the week suggests that neither had woken up to that fact. Well, now they know.

The bigger problem for rugby itself is the vacuum from the code itself. Where are the senior players and former players, speaking up, instinctively and without mediation, about how affronted and appalled they are by this?

 
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Steve Hansen made a short, sharp, off-the-cuff comment condemning the actions and calling for an end to the “mad Monday” celebrations which are so frequently the source of these kind of nightmare stories. It was a case of serious and sincere moral leadership from a man who has lately become a gruff, stoic and quite unexpected exemplar of a kind of progressive thought.

He is to be applauded. But for days now the rest of the code is chillingly silent. For a sport which derives huge portions of its revenue by selling its players as larger-than-life archetypes of our most beloved national traits, this is deeply troubling. Because part of the kind of good character the code trades off – which it has always sought to epitomise by contrast to its supposed poor relation, rugby league – is stepping forward and owning a situation.

The NZRU, which has a legendary PR machine and has trained its young men to be comfortable speaking for hours and saying almost nothing, has a fortress-like quality at the moment. They must be watching, and feel paralysed by these scenes. Yet publicly, the most powerful names in the game haven’t come forward to confront this problem.

In the absence of those senior voices deploying some of their immense mana here, large sections of the country will persist in thinking this is just boys being boys, PC going mad again and what did she expect. As Alex Casey showed in her opinion piece on the issue, our social media sites are flooded with vile comments suggesting all that and worse.

Yet as well as being a serious criminal matter and a blight on the game which will echo long into the future, it is also giant teachable moment for New Zealand. For anything good to come out the disgusting behaviour on that night, someone from within the game needs to step forward and call it what it was. Send a signal to both the code and those who follow it that this is not what they stand for, not acceptable and not what this game is about.

Because while the idea of the Chiefs as “New Zealand’s team” is now gone, the chance for the team’s and the sport’s fans to learn something about consent and boundaries is not. Rugby prides itself on being a place where national virtues like resilience, sacrifice and leadership can be made flesh on sporting fields. Now, at a juncture of great crisis, it’s time for some of its greatest practitioners to live those values.

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Flankly 0 minute ago
'Absolute madness': Clive Woodward rips into Borthwick in wake of NZ loss

Borthwick is supposed to be the archetypical conservative coach, the guy that might not deliver a sparkling, high-risk attacking style, but whose teams execute the basics flawlessly. And that's OK, because it can be really hard to beat teams that are rock solid and consistent in the rugby equivalent of "blocking and tackling".


But this is why the performance against NZ is hard to defend. You can forgive a conservative, back-to-basics team for failing to score tons of tries, because teams like that make up for it with reliability in the simple things. They can defend well, apply territorial pressure, win the set piece battles, and take their scoring chances with metronomic goal kicking, maul tries and pick-and-go goal line attacks.


The reason why the English rugby administrators should be on high alert is not that the English team looked unable to score tries, but that they were repeatedly unable to close out a game by executing basic, coachable skills. Regardless of how they got to the point of being in control of their destiny, they did get to that point. All that was needed was to be world class at things that require more training than talent. But that training was apparently missing, and the finger has to point at the coach.


Borthwick has been in the job for nearly two years, a period that includes two 6N programs and an RWC campaign. So where are the solid foundations that he has been building?

4 Go to comments
N
Nickers 9 minutes ago
Scott Robertson responds to criticism over All Blacks' handling errors

Very poor understanding of what's going on and 0 ability to read. When I say playing behind the gain line you take this to mean all off-loads and site times we are playing in front of the gain line???


Every time we play a lot of rugby behind the gain line (for clarity, meaning trying to build an attack and use width without front foot ball 5m+ behind the most recent breakdown) we go backwards and turn the ball over in some way. Every time a player is tackled behind the most recent breakdown you need more and more people to clear out because your forwards have to go back around the corner, whereas opposition players can keep moving forward. Eventually you run out of either players to clear out or players to pass to and the result in a big net loss of territory and often a turnover. You may have witnessed that 20+ times in the game against England. This is a particularly dumb idea inside your own 40m which is where, for some reason, we are most likely to employ it.


The very best ABs teams never built an identity around attacking from poor positions. The DC era team was known for being the team that kicked the most. To engineer field position and apply pressure, and create broken play to counter attack. This current team is not differentiating between when a defence has lost it's structure and there are opportunities, and when they are completely set and there is nothing on. The reason they are going for 30 minute + periods in every game without scoring a single point, even against Japan and a poor Australian team, is because they are playing most of their rugby on the back foot in the wrong half.

43 Go to comments
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Nickers 38 minutes ago
Scott Robertson responds to criticism over All Blacks' handling errors

I thought we made a lot of progress against that type of defence by the WC last year. Lots of direct running and punching holes rather than using width. Against that type of defence I think you have to be looking to kick on first phase when you have front foot ball which we did relatively successfully. We are playing a lot of rugby behind the gain line at the moment. They are looking for those little interchanges for soft shoulders and fast ball or off loads but it regularly turns into them battering away with slow ball and going backwards, then putting in a very rushed kick under huge pressure.


JB brought that dimension when he first moved into 12 a couple of years ago but he's definitely not been at his best this year. I don't know if it is because he is being asked to play a narrow role, or carrying a niggle or two, but he does not look confident to me. He had that clean break on the weekend and stood there like he was a prop who found himself in open space and didn't know what to do with the ball. He is still a good first phase ball carrier though, they use him a lot off the line out to set up fast clean ball, but I don't think anyone is particularly clear on what they are supposed to do at that point. He was used really successfully as a second playmaker last year but I don't think he's been at that role once this year. He is a triple threat player but playing a very 1 dimensional role at the moment. He and Reiko have been absolutely rock solid on defence which is why I don't think there will be too much experimentation or changes there.

43 Go to comments
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