Tag: Blacks

Sports Insider: ‘All Blacks Sevens’ tag another jarring example of national union losing its way
But if you believe the average Spanish sports fan has the capacity to distinguish between XVs rugby and the sevens version, or understands the team their country just beat actually didn’t contain a single All Blacks player, think again.

The breathless coverage reminded Sports Insider of the time when the USA Eagles beat our men’s sevens team for the first time and the headlines Stateside read: “USA Eagles shock the world.”

Pol Pla, of Spain, scores against the All Blacks Sevens in Dubai. Photo / Getty Images

It mattered not that it was the sevens team. Americans didn’t get that nuance.

Back to Dubai. Our men’s sevens team are hardly “titans”. Nor is it a shock when they get beaten (which seems to be increasingly often nowadays).

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One wonders if the casual Arab sports fan is no different to the American. Did the All Blacks brand just take a hit in the Middle East, where the biggest sports money tap is now located?

The Dubai results simply reinforce how daft and inaccurate it is that New Zealand Rugby insists the men’s sevens team must be called the “All Blacks Sevens”.

In its collective wisdom, New Zealand Rugby (NZR) believes calling the sevens specialists the All Blacks adds to the lustre of the black jersey and creates additional commercial opportunities and increased awareness of our dominant rugby heritage.

I’d argue it does the opposite. If anything, it undermines the All Blacks brand as casual sports fans around the globe cast a superficial eye over international media coverage and see headlines of rugby minnows increasingly lowering our colours.

And now we have the added folly of the same smoke and mirrors being applied to the XVs game with the “All Blacks XV” now touring annually, when in fact most Kiwis would prefer they were called “New Zealand A” in convention with other national unions.

But Silver Lake and the marketing boffins at NZR don’t see it that way.

It’s obvious the majority of Kiwi fans disagree and overwhelmingly decry the All Blacks moniker being given to anything other than the best men’s XVs team we can put on the park.

It’s a cry that continues to fall on deaf ears.

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Directors and executives grossly overpaying themselves

While this madness is going on, directors and senior executives at NZR are paying themselves unprecedented salaries and fees.

Gregor Paul’s revelations in the Herald this week that, on average, senior executives at NZR are paid $467,000 annually and that directors fees now total $1.4 million a year, the latter being more than the yearly grant paid to Heartland unions, should outrage rugby fans.

An average obviously means some executives are on higher wages.

The provincial rumour mill is claiming that the combined salaries of the top two executives in the game (one from NZR and one recently departed from its commercial arm) total more than $2 million.

If that’s accurate, it’s an even greater outrage.

Elite professional sport does need to employ capable executives and pay for competent directors, and those sorts of salaries and fees are not uncommon. But not when an organisation is bleeding money (almost $80m in losses in the past two years) and its flawed strategy is being exposed on a regular basis.

And nor when the independent Pilkington review, commissioned by NZR, has found the organisation’s governance no longer fit for purpose.

Meanwhile, the self-congratulation continues with NZR patting itself on the back for achieving one million subscribers to its All Blacks YouTube channel.

Let’s not forget that earlier this year, NZR ran the white flag up on its misguided NZR+ digital channel, which is costing it more than $10m a year, to pivot to promoting its premium content on YouTube instead.

And if you think a million subscribers on YouTube is some sort of incredible feat, here’s some context around how the numbers stack up for “the greatest team in the history of (all) sport”. Food for thought:
There are approximately 41,900 YouTube channels with over a million subscribers. The All Blacks need to swell their audience by more than five times to five million to even crack the top 100 in sports channels.

A single individual, Ilona Maher, an American rugby sevens player, has over eight million followers across social media, including 4.6 million on Instagram alone (the All Blacks have 2.6 million on Instagram).

A Canadian gymnast named Anna McNulty has almost 10 million YouTube subscribers, as does the Australian cricket team, while Pakistan and Sri Lanka both top five million each (five times the audience of the All Blacks).

French freestyle football player Sean Garnier has almost six million subscribers on YouTube.
If you’ve never even heard of Maher, McNulty or Garnier, join the club.

Even then, to increase the audience, the All Blacks have been forced to piggy-back off international YouTube “sports influencers” who have much bigger numbers.

Hence we have had visits to New Zealand at God knows what cost by the likes of some Americans named “Dude Perfect” (60 million subscribers) and a “Japanese sensation” called the Fischers (eight million), who performed such riveting content as learning how to kick a rugby ball and playing “monster tag”.

Dude Perfect (left and centre), with Richie McCaw, promote a new partnership with the All Blacks.

I wonder what traditional Kiwi rugby fans make of it all.

It’s yet another example of the squandering of money and more of the nonsensical rhetoric NZR continues to push down our throats.

NZR told us during the Silver Lake negotiation saga that there are 60 million All Blacks fans around the world and they wanted to “monetise” them with the Americans’ help. A dollar per fan and there’s $60m annually, went the spiel.

So three years into the deal, we’ve managed to, on average, convince one in every 60 global fans to follow the team’s YouTube content even though it’s free.

Not sure I’d be boasting about that.

Chris Wood and his colourful Notts Forest owner

Has New Zealand football (with a lower case ‘f’) ever had a more golden period than right now?

Auckland FC sit magnificently astride the top of the A-League table with five wins, not a single goal conceded, and the Wellington Phoenix breathing down their necks, therefore setting the stage for a bumper return derby at Mt Smart Stadium on Saturday that will rival Warriors crowds of this year.

Topping it off, we have a Kiwi occupying the No 3 spot on the English Premier League’s list of top goalscorers this season.

Chris Wood has been shining for Nottingham Forest in the Premier League and for the All Whites. Photo / Photosport

Chris Wood’s match-winning penalty against Ipswich Town last weekend not only made the All Whites striker the joint top scorer in his club Nottingham Forest’s Premier League (EPL) history* but also reinforced his position among the EPL’s top scorers this season.

Only Liverpool talisman Mo Salah (13) Manchester City’s Erling Haaland (12) have found the net more often than the nine goals Wood has racked up so far this season.

The 32-year-old former Hamiltonian’s goal against Ipswich also reinforced his growing reputation as potentially the EPL’s best penalty taker.

Wood has an unblemished record of seven successes from as many attempts during his EPL career and has not missed from the spot in a match of consequence since 2016, when he was playing for Leeds United.

Wood might want to steer clear of celebrating too closely with Nottingham Forest’s owner though.

Greek shipping magnate Evangelos Marinakis is one of the more unusual EPL club owners.

For starters, he had previously been accused of heroin trafficking and match-fixing – both charges he successfully fought in court.

However, he now has fresh charges of “inciting sporting violence” and “funding a criminal organisation” to deal with, both related to the murder of a policeman with a flare gun.

Marinakis also owns leading Greek club Olympiakos and prosecutors in his native country claim he was in cahoots with the club’s notorious “Gate 7 firm” who are accused of killing the policeman during a riot.

He denies the charges.

SailGP and Sir Russell Coutts are flying high

If Kiwi football is soaring, our sailing stocks aren’t too far behind either.

Not only is the America’s Cup locked away for at least another two years but SailGP – the brainchild of Sir Russell Coutts – has never been in better shape as it heads into its fifth season.

The series will make its long-awaited Auckland debut in the second event of the 2025 season on January 18-19 and is set for bumper summer crowds eager to watch the action close-up.

But it is the commercial performance of the high-voltage foiling catamarans that is catching the eye.

SailGP is set to break even for the first time, with its managing director Andrew Thompson claiming revenue has “at least doubled” since the 2022-23 series.

The New Zealand SailGP team. Photo / Photosport

Luxury watchmaker Rolex has signed up as the series’ first-ever overall naming-rights sponsor and SailGP has since announced two other major commercial deals with Emirates Airlines and international logistics company DP World.

“Our league is growing revenues,” Thompson told business website SportsPro. “It has always been our aspiration that after five seasons, we’d be in a situation where we are at least breaking even. We’re on track to do that, which is something that’s never happened in this sport before.

Thompson described the 10-year title sponsorship deal with Rolex as a “coming-of-age” partnership, saying Emirates and DP World came on board because of SailGP’s growing presence in the Middle East.

“We have had a number of events in the Middle East now, in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which has sparked that interest, frankly,” he said, adding that the US and Asia are the next targets for an expanded presence.

Thompson said SailGP’s new deals put the series alongside some of the biggest global sports organisations from a commercial perspective.

“It is a privilege of ours to be alongside the likes of Wimbledon, [the] PGA Tour and Formula One and others,” he said. “It is certainly our aspiration to be amongst the top tier of sports properties.”

Last season, SailGP claimed its broadcast audience had increased by 48% to reach 193 million households across 212 territories.

First Nations Cup rugby tournament to be played in England in 2026

You read it here first … it will be announced shortly that England will host the inaugural Nations Cup tournament in 2026, between countries from the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.

The second tournament will be hosted two years later by Qatar, with the blood money set to substantially boost the coffers of individual national unions as the Middle East finally adds rugby to its dubious hosting list of high-profile sports.

England’s Chandler Cunningham-South tackles All Blacks hooker Codie Taylor at Twickenham last month. Photo / Photosport

And the United States has been earmarked for 2030, although there are still several caveats on that yet to be satisfied.

If they are, it means the earliest a Southern Hemisphere country can host the tournament is 2032.

Will New Zealand ever host it?

Not unless Saudi Arabia buys us.

Time zones and commercial imperatives mean the Nations Cup will be no different to the World Cup now – its finals will never be played here.

Team of the Week

Team McLaren Bruce McLaren’s name will be celebrated internationally if the team the Kiwi icon inspired can hold off Ferrari to win their first Formula One Constructors Championship in 26 years in the final round of the world championship series in Abu Dhabi on Sunday. Ferrari sit just 21 points behind McLaren’s Lance Stroll and Oscar Piastri.

Steven Adams Tops the Herald’s Sporting Rich list (yet again) with $21m-plus, despite a year out of action injured in the NBA.

Howick College The Auckland school’s golden-point win over red-hot favourites Hamilton Girls’ High School in the final was the best game of the popular Condor sevens tournament.

* Before the Premier League era, Grenville Morris scored the most goals for Nottingham Forest, with 217 career strikes in all competitions
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December 5, 2024
George Nepia: The All Blacks legend who conquered Britain and became an icon
One hundred years ago, the All Blacks embarked on their legendary 1924-25 tour, earning the moniker “The Invincibles” after winning all 32 matches across Britain, Ireland, France, and Canada. Among them was the

A hundred years ago this month a largely unknown 19-year-old All Black called George Nepia walked down the gangplank of the passenger ship, RMS Remuera, in Plymouth, stepping on to English soil after a seven-week voyage from New Zealand.

Six months later he’d be heading home a legend.

The fearless, hugely skilled teenager from Wairoa played the full 80 minutes of every one of the 32 unbeaten games the All Black team that became known as The Invincibles had on their 1924-25 tour of Britain, Ireland, France, and Canada.

At the time, weighing 83kg and 1.75m tall, Nepia was a big, powerfully built man for his position. He was the heaviest back in the squad and outweighed six of the 15 forwards.

How good was he? Four years after the tour the English captain, Wavell Wakefield, wrote that “one member of the team, Nepia, deserves special mention”.

“His perfect catching of the ball, his kicking, and his amazing power of whipping the ball off the ground, and charging into and through oncoming forwards, marked him out as a player of a generation”.

Fifty years ago, I had the huge good fortune to spend almost an hour with Nepia, and his teammate, a genius, will-of-the-wisp, 56kg midfielder, Bert Cooke, as the side assembled in Auckland for their golden jubilee reunion.

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They were both humble and hugely likeable. A prime example of their mutual respect came when Cook headed off to the toilet. Nepia leaned in, almost whispering, and said, “See that man? He was so brilliant that sometimes in a game I’d have to remind myself that I wasn’t a spectator, and should stop staring in amazement at what he could do.”

The tour had the potential for disaster if the players hadn’t all got on, Nepia said. “But by the time we got to England after that huge boat trip we were like brothers, as tight as a club team. A club team where every player is very good.”

George Nepia leads the haka. Photo / Photosport / New Zealand All Blacks Archive

His stunning form on the ‘24-25 tour brought Nepia enduring fame in Britain and in New Zealand. In 1982, when he toured as a guest with the New Zealand Maori team, a packed crowd in Swansea stood and cheered him when he was introduced on the field.

After his death in 1986, TVNZ repeated a This Is Your Life programme on Nepia. The audience, of 1.6 million people, represented half our population at the time.

His story is as extraordinary as the talents that made him stand out, even in The Invincibles, a team packed with great players.

Bizarrely, two of his special strengths, a devastating head-on tackle, and a massive spiral punt, were coached into him by an American Mormon teacher, who had never played rugby.

At 13, Nepia had left Nuhaka Māori School to work on a farm and then joined a labouring gang building the railway to Gisborne. After a year working as an adult, he’d saved enough to pay his own secondary school fees.

George Nepia in action for the All Blacks. Photo / Photosport

He planned to go to Te Aute College, but a close friend persuaded him to instead go to the Māori Agricultural College, set up by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints at Bridge Pa in 1913.

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One of the teachers, Elder Erwin Moser, who had played American football before coming to New Zealand, coached MAC’s rugby team. “He didn’t know much about rugby tactics,” Nepia would say, “but we respected him a lot.”

After a school game, Moser took Nepia aside. “When you tackle,” he said, “keep your eyes open.” In his 1963 book written with Terry McLean, Nepia says, “It sounds funny, but that is the most important of all the bits that go into a good tackle.”

Moser soon got into more detail.

The first time he tackled an opponent, Moser said, Nepia had to speed up, “and crash into his stomach with your shoulder”.

“You’ll knock him backwards, and all the air will go out of his lungs. You might knock him out.”

For the second tackle, Moser changed the particulars. “Go below his knees. Move in from the same distance as before, and hit him hard. You’ll knock his legs from under him, and he’ll come down hard.”

What about the third tackle, asked Nepia? “There won’t be a third time. If you’ve made the first and second the right way, the third time he will kick.”

Nepia became fascinated by how far Moser, who seemed ancient to a schoolboy but was actually still in his 20s, could spiral pass a football.

“I started to think of the possibilities of imitating the way he could throw the ball 40 or 50 metres, sending it spinning like a top. I wanted to do the same with a punt. I used to stay after team training with a couple of teammates kicking to each other. One day, I fired off the perfect spiral punt. I was shocked and so excited I found it hard to sleep that night.”

Invincible they were, and the Invincibles they remain. This image is displayed at the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in Dunedin, New Zealand. Photo / Sports Hall of Fame

It took weeks of determined practice, but at last Nepia could spiral punt 50 metres, with pinpoint accuracy, even under pressure. He called it “The Bullet”. It was “the cream on the coffee of good punting”.

After school, he made a star-studded Hawke’s Bay side, as a second five-eighths. But bizarrely, his debut in a first-class match as a fullback was the first All Blacks trial of 1924 in Auckland. It was only the second time in his life he’d played at fullback.

He performed so well in what was then the No 1 jersey, that when an All Black squad of 23 players was named for a four-game warm-up tour of Australia in July 1924, Nepia was the only fullback.

But before they headed for Britain, The Invincibles were roasted by Auckland media in a way Ian Foster or Scott Robertson might recognise.

Returning from Australia they were beaten, 14-3, by Auckland at Eden Park. The 1905 All Black George Tyler said in The New Zealand Herald they were the worst team to ever represent New Zealand. In the Auckland Star, a writer said “it is a disgrace Auckland are not being sent north, instead of the All Blacks”.

Fifty years later, Nepia was still irate about the comments. He told me in ‘74, “We’d got off the boat from Australia at two o’clock in the morning after the roughest sea trip you could imagine. We played Auckland that afternoon! We were all still swaying from the boat’s motion. I waited to catch one high ball, and started to rock so much I fell tail over head before the ball landed.”

By contrast, the tour of Britain and France was an unmitigated triumph.

After beating Ireland (6-0), the All Blacks swept past Wales (19-0), England (17-11), and France (30-6). (Not a single game was played in Scotland, because – I am not making this up – officials there were still sulking because they’d made a poor deal on gate receipts from the 1905 test with the All Blacks at Inverleith.)

As the tour went on, Nepia talked with his captain, Cliff Porter, about the strain of playing match after match. Porter’s solution? “On match nights,” he told Nepia, “drink yourself paralytic if you like.” Nepia took the advice. “I drank enough beer to help me sleep like a child. Porter knew how to get the best out of a man.”

After the glory days of The Invincibles, Nepia’s talent never faltered, but his sporting career took some unexpected turns.

At a time when the NZRU grovelled to South Africa’s racist rules, Nepia was one of several gifted Maori players left behind when New Zealand toured South Africa in 1928. His All Blacks career ended in 1930, when he played fullback in all four tests against the British Lions, New Zealand winning the series 30-1.

Nepia had married the love of his life, Huinga Kohere, in 1926. By the mid-1930s, in a world ravaged by the Great Depression, the couple and their young family were barely scraping by on their small farm in Rangitukia, on the East Coast.

In 1935, he accepted a £500 contract (“It was like a million pounds to us,” Nepia would say) to play league for two seasons for the Streatham and Mitcham club in London. He was a success, but the club owner’s attempt to introduce league to London didn’t work.

Back in New Zealand in 1938, Nepia’s last international game was at Carlaw Park, for the Kiwis’ league team against Australia. In a thrilling finish, the Kiwis won, 16-15.

It’s a measure of Nepia’s mana that, at a time when league was considered the work of the Devil by many rugby officials he was quietly welcomed back into rugby after World War II. As a 42-year-old, he played his last two first-class games for East Coast in 1947.

A revered British sportswriter and author of the 1950s, Denzil Batchelor, would sum up the rugby legacy left by Nepia. “It’s not a question of whether Nepia was the greatest fullback in history. It’s just a question of which of the others is fit to help him on with his Cotton Oxford boots.”

Phil Gifford has twice been judged New Zealand sportswriter of the year, has won nine New Zealand and two Australasian radio awards, and been judged New Zealand Sports Columnist of the year three times. In 2010 he was honoured with the SPARC lifetime achievement award for services to sports journalism.
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September 19, 2024

Tag: Blacks

Sports Insider: ‘All Blacks Sevens’ tag another jarring example of national union losing its way

Directors and executives grossly overpaying themselves

Chris Wood and his colourful Notts Forest owner

SailGP and Sir Russell Coutts are flying high

First Nations Cup rugby tournament to be played in England in 2026

Team of the Week

George Nepia: The All Blacks legend who conquered Britain and became an icon