Brendan Gallagher: Yes, it’s time for All Blacks to end their Pacific shame

Guys, it’s not the dark side of the moon. No fewer than four airlines, including the national carrier Air New Zealand, with whom I understand the NZRU work closely, fly from Auckland to Faleolo Airport in Samoa.
And the return fare is £350, top whack, possibly less if you book ahead, almost certainly free if you asked nicely and posed for a picture at the departure gate.
The Tanoa Tusitala Hotel right on Apia Bay is cracking – good gym, nice pool, free Wifi – and has jars full of those sickly complimentary boiled sweets at reception if you really insist. It costs the bog standard £100 a night you will pay for any four-star hotel around the rugby world.
So New Zealand, for heaven’s sake stop making excuses, uttering diplomatic platitudes and frankly insulting our intelligence. The All Blacks might be sponsored and bankrolled by Adidas but Nike say it best: Just do it.
Get on that plane and get yourselves up to Samoa (flight time 3hr 46min) and don’t you dare go demanding the normal appearance fees that All Blacks have come to regard as their birthright on their highly lucrative global travels. This one is on you, it’s your round guys, and long overdue, frankly.
Not that it will cost the money-conscious All Blacks a New Zealand dollar anyway. Samoa at home to the All Blacks for the first time is a match the entire rugby world will queue up to see and TV rights alone would comfortably cover all costs and leave a surplus which should immediately be directed to the Samoan Union for further investment in youth and academy programmes.

I thought ‘sorry’ was meant to be the hardest word, not ‘thank you’. The All Blacks have a huge moral debt of honour to pay to Samoa and Samoan rugby players whether they be native-born on the islands or part of the very considerable close-knit Samoan community in New Zealand, especially in Auckland, which has contributed so lavishly to the distinctive rugby culture of the most perennially enduring and strongest Test team in the world.
Samoans have given the All Blacks an X-factor and dynamic which has made them even more formidable since they started to come on stream. Imagine for a moment New Zealand teams without the likes of Jerry Collins, Mils Muliaina, Rodney So’oialo, Va’aiga Tuigamala, Michael Jones and Frank Bunce?
Consider the impact of Julian Savea, New Zealand-born but from a noted Samoan family, and that also of Sonny Bill Williams, Ma’a Nonu or Tana Umaga who are among the many ‘Samoan heritage’ players who would have been perfectly entitled to play for either country.
Indeed, Tana Umaga’s brother Mike captained Samoa on many occasions and as Nonu recently admitted: “When I was at primary school, I always wanted to play for Samoa. I had a strong background. Samoa was a priority – I watched the All Blacks – but I felt drawn to Samoa. That all started to slowly change when I went to college.”
The schools, club and provincial scene in New Zealand is massively energised and enriched by the Samoan influence, I have never heard a Kiwi attempt to deny that, yet New Zealand wants its cake and to eat it, too. They want everything the Samoan people and culture bring to their party but offer so little support in return.
Not once have the All Blacks deigned to visit Samoa for a Test, nor for that matter have they ever ventured to Tonga or Fiji which is probably the most shameful statistic in world rugby, a mystifying uncaring dismissal of their closest neighbours geographically and sportswise.
Think of the boost such Tests – and the others that must follow – would provide for three of the few nations in the world where rugby is the No.1 sport. Just for the record, Six Nations countries –12,000 miles away – have played 24 Tests to date on the islands and generally those visits have been a great success and a hat tip to all concerned. But it’s New Zealand they all want to see above all others. Of course it is.

Whether they like it or not, New Zealand are rugby’s flagship team and nation and yet their ‘missionary’ work is seemingly always guided by the cheque book which is why we find them playing in destinations such as Chicago, Hong Kong and Tokyo but never Apia, Suva and Nukualofa.
England habitually get accused of arrogance but over the decades have a track record second to none of altruistically spreading the word in the Pacific, Far East and North America on tours with little intrinsic rugby value for the visitors and absolutely no monetary value.
Such an attitude diminishes rather than adds to the All Blacks brand. New Zealand ruthlessly played the Pacific Islands card in winning the 2011 World Cup bid – a ‘regional bid’ not a New Zealand bid we were asked to believe at one stage – and the colour and excitement they would bring to proceedings was much used in promoting the tournament.
But deep down how much do they actually respect the autonomy and development of those teams?
In fact, you sometimes wonder if there is a real fear of these nations reaching their full potential. The perception might not be entirely accurate – plenty of fine Kiwi coaches of my acquaintance do good jobs as hired hands in far flung outposts of the rugby world – but when it comes to the islands, New Zealand are viewed as voracious takers and grudging givers.
New Zealand likes to see itself as the unofficial multi-cultural capital of the South Pacific and certainly economically it acts as a magnet to many on the islands, that’s a simple demographic fact. The memory of the Samoan, Tongan and Fijian team hotels being besieged from dawn to dusk by singing ex-patriots throughout most of the 2011 World Cup is fresh in my mind and helped make the New Zealand World Cup the huge success that it was.
Yet I was constantly stopped in my tracks when talking to New Zealanders, from the top of the rugby hierarchy down to the everyday fan, as to how Samoa or the other islands were referred to in the same way as an Englishman might talk of Cornwall. Different, but ours.

Wrong, Samoa and the islands are sovereign states.
It’s a complicated situation as New Zealand friends constantly point out, Auckland is an extraordinary clearing house for many Polynesians – some stay, others don’t; some take New Zealand citizenship, others don’t and some happen to be born in New Zealand but consider themselves an Islander. Which is why the situation needed to be handled sensitively, and with a little humility.
Does New Zealand, pioneers of true democracy and proud new nationhood, ever consider how it can often appear from the outside looking in?
It was OK for Michael Jones, Frank Bunce, Pat Lam, Offisa Tonu’u and Stephen Bachop – Samoans, capped by Samoa but born in New Zealand – to play for Samoa until they actually proved to be rather good at which point they were expected to become New Zealanders again although Lam, having captained Samoa at the World Cup in 1991 and then flirted with the All Blacks in 1992, returned to the Samoan fold in 1993.
The case of Samoan full-back Sosene Anesi, a blazing talent circa 2004-5 when New Zealand didn’t exactly lack for world-class backs, is particularly galling. He looked as if he might be something very special – I recall him starring in an All Blacks trial one perishing night in Napier just before the Lions Test series in 2005 – but he was capped just once off the bench against Fiji before being consigned to the dustbin, ineligible ever again to play for Samoa, the land of his birth. What a waste.
The situation was running amok around this time as New Zealand, under Graham Henry, tried to rebuild after the 2003 World Cup ahead of what they thought would be a mighty challenge by the 2005 Lions.

The logic-defying nadir was reached in 2004 when a Pacific Islands XV was specifically convened to promote rugby in the islands and to give them a Test platform to regularly play the biggest nations. Off the back of limited preparation a ‘Scratch Islands’ XV ran Australia and New Zealand close in two terrific away Tests with their stand-out performers being Fijian wing Siteveni Sivivatu and Tongan back-rower Sione Luaki.
And strangely both found themselves playing for the All Blacks a year later against the Lions with Sivivatu taking a starring role second only to Dan Carter. Absolutely scandalous when you think about it. Asking the All Blacks to play the Pacific Islands was like putting King Herod in charge of child welfare.
The IRB have tightened up but there is still a cold ruthlessness about how the All Blacks go about their work tapping into every player stream possible. It’s OK for Pita Ahki to star for Tonga at the IRB U20 championships in 2011 but hang on, what’s this? There is Ahki playing for New Zealand U20 at the same tournament the following year and the next thing we know he is playing in the New Zealand national Sevens team, a squad traditionally including a good percentage of talented Fijians by the way.
Lote Raikabula, David Raikuna and Junior Tomasi Cama, the son of Fiji’s second greatest Sevens player, have all played leading roles recently for the New Zealand Sevens team while coach Gordon Tietjens named two Fijians in his all-time New Zealand Seven – Joe Rokokoco  and the richly-talented Amasio Valence, who has won three Commonwealth Games Sevens gold medals with New Zealand.
Then there is Frank Helai a seriously talented Tongan-born and reared centre who became an All Black last year against Japan and has featured heavily in the New Zealand Sevens squad only for the NZRU to discover last month, when they were filling out the paper work for their Commonwealth Games squad, that he still only has a Tongan passport and is ineligible.
Red faces but, for some reason, very little outcry. If a lesser rugby nation had perpetrated that cock-up they would have the book thrown at them. On the subject of Tonga, a brilliant young centre Charles Piutau also played for Tonga U20 in that 2010 tournament. What happened to him I wonder? Oh yes, he was New Zealand’s top try-scorer in the 2011 Junior World Cup and now has ten All Black caps.
It can be a bit schizophrenic. Islanders living in New Zealand – many of them with dual passports, some with no passports at all – are often recognised and lauded as Samoans, Tongans and Fijians until the moment they display an exceptional talent at rugby at which point they become potential future All Blacks.
Or they do something bad.
Like most multi-ethnic cities in the world there are outbreaks of street and gang crime in Auckland but what always strikes me is that press reports of those incidents normally highlight the ethnicity of those involved. They were Tongan youths, Samoan yobs. Yet if they are promising rugby players they will most certainly be young New Zealanders.
Sport and patriotism take no prisoners and New Zealand are not alone in their attitudes. For a long time here in Britain, Andy Murray was Scottish when he lost and played badly and British when he won the Olympics and Wimbledon. It was a joke, sort of, except many didn’t find it funny.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Scotland and Wales have been ruthless, and in the case of the latter in the early Graham Henry years downright cynical, in recruiting Southern Hemisphere cast-offs, whether they be properly qualified or not, and France and England have no compunction in introducing mainly South Africans who have qualified by residency or through a grandparent. The focus for now, however, is firmly on New Zealand because their attitudes are harming small developing teams rather than just irritating other big teams.
It’s definitely time to give, not take. The great Bryan Williams concurs and that will do for me. Son of a Samoan father, legendary New Zealand wing, three times the Samoa coach at World Cups, chairman of the NZRFU during the 2011 World Cup, erudite lawyer and the father of two current Samoan internationals, including Paul the captain. Right in the middle of the mix and sensitive to all parties. What does he think?
“I wish the All Blacks would go up to the Pacific Islands and there are lots of ex-players and current players who believe it should happen,” says Williams. “But they are governed by their masters. There have been other teams who have gone up to the Islands – New Zealand A and New Zealand Maori but the All Blacks have never been.
“Wales have, France have, Ireland have and England have been to Fiji on a number of occasions. There’s no earthly reason why the All Blacks should not have been to Samoa or Tonga. There are so many Pacific Island players who are making big contributions to New Zealand rugby and they’d love to see it.”
Enough of this faffing around. It’s time for New Zealand to start doing the right thing and, whisper it quietly, win a load of new friends and admirers in the process.