It’s easy to imagine that head coach Scott Robertson – and all his professional predecessors – had their houses stocked with tinned food, bottled water and enough toilet paper to survive any apocalyptic event.
Robertson, like his predecessors, is driven by a doomer mindset when it comes to preparing the All Blacks and an unhealthy paranoia about what could go wrong and how deep his contingency planning needs to be.
This feeds into a hoarding mentality – where they want to pick more players than they need, negotiate more preparation time than is strictly useful and panic that any tiny deviation from a meticulously planned training schedule will derail everything.
Sam Darry smashes into the Hawke’s Bay defence in the NPC semifinals. Photo / Photosport
All Blacks coaches being overly protective of their players and high-performance environments is not a new story by any means, but Robertson made a decision this week to not allow two of his players – George Bell and Sam Darry – to play for Canterbury in the NPC final. This was so contrary to the best interests of so many stakeholders that it felt like New Zealand Rugby needed to intervene and overrule the exclusion.
The rationale for not letting Bell and Darry play is that teams in black take priority over all other interests, and with the national team due to be on the plane to Chicago on Friday and the NPC final on Saturday, protocol dictated what needed to happen.
It’s apparent from the comments made by Canterbury coach Marty Bourke that the All Blacks coaches highlighted their concerns about their current situation at lock, which has seen the experienced Tupou Vaa’i and Patrick Tuipulotu ruled out of the Grand Slam tour with injury.
Reading between the lines, the selectors obviously argued that they want Darry – who was called up to replace Tuipulotu the day after the tour party was announced and who has not spent any time with the national team this year – on the training ground with them, learning calls, systems and team patterns.
Fair enough, but for the fact that Darry, as the fourth lock in the squad, would appear unlikely to be involved against Ireland next week, and more pertinently, allowing him to play in the final and fly to the US the next day wouldn’t leave him or the All Blacks catastrophically underprepared, should some unforeseen drama strike and he be required to play.
It’s the same story with Bell: he’s the third hooker in the party and unless injury befalls Codie Taylor or Samisoni Taukei’aho, he’s also likely to be in the stands at Soldier Field.
By any reasonable assessment, it does seem an excessively protective decision to ask two young players who have been an integral part of Canterbury’s campaign to date to forfeit the final to hold tackle bags for nine days rather than seven.
And it’s the fact that Darry and Bell have been with Canterbury all season that shapes both sides of this debate.
The All Blacks can say neither player has spent any time with them this season, so they need to maximise the training exposure of both.
But Canterbury can make the more persuasive argument that it’s better for the high-performance development of both – particularly Darry who missed all of the Super Rugby Pacific season with injury – to play in the final against Otago and have the formative experience of being centrally involved in a major domestic occasion.
Both Bell and Darry are leaders in the Canterbury set-up and it seems to be quite a warped value matrix that has determined that there is more career value in them being part of Robertson’s insurance policy rather than being afforded the lifelong memories and psychological benefits that would come from being part of a championship team. Letting them play in the final is not an either/or scenario: they could both play in Dunedin and both spend a full week training with the All Blacks.
But the biggest issue with the decision to let the All Blacks trump all is the message that it sends about what level of importance is applied to the NPC within the halls of power.
There is an undeniable farcical element in that the All Blacks are going to Chicago as part of a commercial strategy that is designed to generate additional revenue to be pumped back into the grassroots of the game, and yet New Zealand Rugby has signed off on devaluing the final – the showpiece event of grassroots rugby – to indulge the paranoia of the All Blacks.
It’s a decision that undermines the reputation of the competition and has punitive consequences for local sponsors and fans. The whole effectiveness of the trickle-down economic theory is dubious as it is, but actively harming the grassroots to enable the All Blacks to make money to save the grassroots is the stuff of Monty Python.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.