Time for us to see some new thinking

Remember the elderly joke about the flight from Australia to New Zealand? “There’s a time difference between the two countries,” the captain tells his passengers as he prepares to touch down in Auckland. “Please put your watches back 50 years.”

As events in All Black territory over the last few days confirm, there’s many a true word spoken in jest. Three decades after England‘s newly professionalised clubs started lobbing political hand grenades in the general direction of Twickenham and its battalion of “old farts”, the spirit of insurgency has finally arrived in the furthest-flung corner of the Tier One landscape.

Provincial unions have produced a counter-proposal that flies in the face of sweeping modernisation recommendations contained in a governance review – a defensive move that has gone down like a bucket of cold sick with such titans as Richie McCaw, Sam Whitelock and David Kirk, who have publicly declared support for a threatened breakaway.

You have to laugh. No one was more condemnatory of the top English clubs during their interminable dispute with Twickenham than the governing class in New Zealand, who saw the owners and chief executives who brought the Premiership into being as vandals and usurpers – Great Satans threatening the game they played in heaven. Suffice to say they’re now getting theirs.

But leaving smugness aside for a second, there’s a serious question to be asked: namely, is it possible, in rugby‘s big-money age, to maintain a “seamless” game, with a meaningful connection between elite professionals and the grass roots? It’s thriving in France, but the link has been broken in Wales, another nation where union thinks of itself as the game of the people.

If things are going the same way in New Zealand, where rugby is lived and breathed by so many, new thinking and new structures are going to be needed. New leaders too.