Posts by Tom Semmens
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Here is another story I heard: The four year old daughter of a female of my acquaintance got up and left the room after the All Black's lost. When her Mum went to see where she was, she was in her room with all her All Black figurines lined up, and she was knocking them over one by one.
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"...I am so glad your anally retentive, hopelessly retarded, minimalist emotional palette is rejected by rugby heroes such as Dan Carter..."
How about I react in kind and tell you to fuck off you gaybo hippy prick? :)
Or how about we accept some people have different values around what constitutes strong male behaviour and leave the personal abuse out? Nothing so intolerant as a Greenie questioned, eh? Sure you were paying attention to the message when the family violence ad was on?
Jeremy - I am not saying he shouldn't have had a good cry, its just I know that for me my sense of male dignity would keep it for somewhere private.
Anyway - this whole Barnes business, it was clear on morning report today that Jock Hobbs is furious about his appointment and his decisions. And I note that at the beginning of the tournament the IRB told the coaches of all the teams that touch judges would not be allowed to rule on offside and forward passes at this tournament. So poor young Mr. Barnes was not only well out of his depth, he was largely denied the help of the much more experienced referees (Spreadbury and Kaplan I think) running the touchline. Taken with the IRB "crackdown" on foul play they announced immediately before the tournament it points to a scarcely credible general incompetence on the part of the IRB. Why was it they waited until the world cup itself to make significant (and in my view retrograde) changes to how games are officiated?? Paddy O'Brien, who now lives in Dublin and appears to be littel more than mouthpiece for the IRB, has made some seriously wrong decisions. You know, the more I think about it, the more angry I feel at Paddy O'Brien and more sorry I feel for Mr. Barnes. A young refereeing lion sacrificed by an IRB donkey.
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Oh and also slightly off topic, but am I the only person who was shocked to see tears in Dan Carter's eyes when he came off? I know its all very metrosexual and snaggy for guys to cry and stuff, and I am all for expressing how you feel, and I thought it was brilliant that the first ad after we lost was the family violence one.
But rugby is about strong male values, and blubbing (in public while the game is still on) isn't what I expect from test match hardened All Blacks.
For better or for worse, honestly my immediate, instinctive reaction was to think "For God's sake stop grizzling like schoolboy and start acting like man."
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I refuse to blame to referee.
I blame the person who appointed him to officiate a game he clearly was not capable of refereeing.
And is not a kiwi, Paddy O'Brien, the IRB refereeing supremo?
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I will say it again. Stephen Jones is right. It might be for the wrong reasons, but this time he is right. We arrogantly turn up and think that if the referee will just give us a fair suck of the sav we'll demolish all comers by 40 points, playing like the Harlem Globetrotters with a great forward pack.
Need a drill to drop a goal with five minutes to go? Nah - we are to good for that - we'll win by scoring heaps of thrilling tries!
We don't need a George Gregan chipping away at the referee and a coach with cunning tactics and a team full of sly buggers milking penalties to sneak victory. The All Blacks are above that sort of filthy stuff because they are bigger, faster, better, more athletic, Aryans of the rugby world are we, here to teach everyone about the game.
When it comes to rugby New Zealanders are far too arrogant and superior in their attitude and once again we've come crashing to earth at the world cup.
Its not the players - they gave everything playing a game plan based on a flawed cultural assumption of superiority.
As a Hawke's Bay fan I've got a pretty cynical view on the institutional aspect of professionalism in this country, we have the all our top players selected from carefully age group competitions then playing the same style of professional rugby for the same (basically) 3-4 teams, all with the same rugby culture from coaches and physios and sundry hangers on who have all been through the same courses at Massey. Its all become a very chummy cartel for the benefit of a few professional franchises.
We've lost five world cups now using exactly the same imperatives in our corporate decision-making at the top. Rather than stopping to think that maybe our whole system stinks, we just try and do the same thing, only better next time.
Once upon a time we would have had a first five who would have calmly dropped a goal to win the game and remarked afterwards that the pressure was worse when kicking the winning goal in the face of 50,000 screaming Cantabrians in a nail biting Ranfuly shield challenge.
No wonder our guys choked when the pressure came on - they have come through a system which has rolled out the red carpet for them and they've walked along it - they only hit the brick wall of pressure in games like Sunday's, and by then its to late for them to learn how to cope.
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I don't want Henry to stay. Why? Because we need a branch and root re-examination of our assumptions and expectations at the international level and the lower tiers that support it. We need to look at how dangerously mono-cultural and monolithic (in playing style and professional approach) of our professional franchises compared to the strength in variety of our old provincial teams and question if the Super 14 is really the best competition to pick our international players from. Grahame Henry is part of our now discredited corporate professional rugby culture, and therefore he can't survive any meaningful review.
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Actually, Stephen Jones is right, and we have to deal with it.
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Sorry to bang on about it as well Danielle, but it isn't hinsight. To come back to it, we've crashed out of three world cups now. We lost in 1995 to drop goals. Johnny Wilkinson won on drop goals in 2003. World Cups are decided by men like George Gregan and Martin Johnson working the referee and by having a simple game plan executed with ruthless efficiency. The All Blacks used to play like that, but Stephen Jones is right - nowadays we think we just have to turn up and if the referee gives us a fair playing field we'll win every time. I have nothing but respect for the humility of our players and grace with which they have accepted defeat. But our system is wrong.
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"...It's all very well to say 'play a different style or be proved arrogant' - but if you keep on winning, as we do, with the style we were using before (even against France!), why on earth would you change it?..."
Except we haven't kept winning, we've not won a rugby world cup since 1987. Now, if you decide that the RWC isn't important then what you say is true. but given that the entire game is now buoilt around the four year RWC cycle, to ignore the world cup would be an absolute mistake. So winning the RWC is nowadays everything - and so we need to pick a team that will win the RWC, not win everything in between.victory by foul means is as sweet as victory by fair means
"...I was with you til then..."
So lets posit this. Would that referee been as bad for the Wallabies with George Gregan in his ear? Would we have lost if we had milked a few penalties shots as a result of sly, dirty, Fitzpatrician cunning?
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After sleeping on it, I've decided watching my beloved Hawkes Bay defeat the hated enemy from Hamilton in front of a raprurous crowd of supporters in Napier yesterday far, far outweighed the All Black loss. Seeing a crowd of staid provincial types spontaneously burst into song, hearing the chants of "Hawkes Bay, Hawkes Bay" give a thrill to my heart and a small tear to my eye. The game also demonstrated that you don't need pampered highly paid, high performance show ponies for a great contest - just two evenly matched sides, a passionate crowd, a fine day and a desire to play rugby. The provinces are the warp and woof of the game in this country, and they'll be packing McLean park long after Mr. Murdoch & Adidas pack up the circus tent and take their millions elsewhere.
My last comment on the All Black quarter final is simple. As long as our means and ends are not in alignment, we will continue to lose like this. Our means are to play like the Harlem Globetrotters because that feeds our rugby hubris and our rugby conceit that we are the best and have nothing to learn from anyone else; Our ends are to win the rugby world cup. At the end of the day, the team that wins the RWC has to play so-called (by us in our arrogance) "ugly" rugby. If the All Blacks had beaten France 15-9 all penalties in a tight game we wouldn't be calling it "ugly" this morning. And for anyone thinks we are not incredibly arrogant when it comes to rugby answer me this - why is it, after four years of meticulous planning and over fifty million dollars of expenditure, when it came to the last five minutes of the quarter final we didn't have a drilled set move to drop a goal? And why, in such a tight game, did we not have a Sean Ftizpatrick or a Zinzan Brooke chipping away at the refferee to get us a critical penalty? My view is the reason why is we think we are above that sort of thing, we are to good to bother to milk a penalty out of the ref - we can score tires and we just need a level playing field referee wise and we''ll demolish anyone. Hopefully this defeat will teach us some rugby humility. If we want to win the RWC then instead of exulting in 40 plus point wins between cups, lets pick a team that isn't to good to mix it with the mortals,that kicks it's penalties, take it's drop goals, works the refereee and realises that winning sometimes requires cunning and that victory by foul means is as sweet as victory by fair means at this level.