Blimey !
Blimey !
"It is, of course, a mass generalisation to say that the aspiring teenage All Black of today is too busy attending to their Instagram account and discussing their pathway with their agent to spend time refining the critical acts of pass and catch, but then again, the result from Canberra suggests that maybe it’s not."
Or calm down and accept that Schoolboy selections are very much based on school pedigree rather than tried and tested success at the professional level.
The ABs, Boks, England, Ireland, etc have all had great success at national level while their Schools, and even u21 sides, sucked. And vice versa.
An interesting topic - that is based on a number of both political and cultural issues, as well as rugby related issues.
Background
New Zealand had from the early 20th Century developed Rugby as a national issue as to pride in their country, Despite a small population compared to the other rugby playing nations in the world Rug by was hat portrayed as a special culture relating to being proud of their country een while Rugby was an amateur sport.
The sport of Rugby was boosted by the fact that Professionalism increased the chance of expansion of Rugby, At the time there were two vehicles started to boost Rugby as a sport paying players good salaries and those were the introduction of the Tri-Nations Championship and Super Rugby. In the latter competitions New Zealand Rugby got a massive financial boost and the sport develop even further. Super Rugby resulted in New Zealand franchises importing players from the Pacific Islands to play rugby for New Zealand franchises and All Black Rugby got a boost with some players qualifying to play for the All Blacks as well. So despite the small population the boosting of Rugby continued, The New Zealand Rugby boost went ahead and the teams becme stronger than ever before,
The result was that by 2008 the New Zealand team had he strongest team by a proverbial mile in the world. BY 2014 they had a team comprising of champion players. But players gets older and by 2018 replacement of players became necessary and the teams supporting the system was starting to suffer the same fate.
The 2021 decision to dstroy Super Rugby and start Super Rugby Pacific was a disaster, It weaeened opposition and it lowered the sandard of opposition with the result that it eakened performances of players,
However, other maladies hit rugby on school level hard, One of hose were mentioend by Plum the other one nobody wants to touch. The culture taking over was the Woke Culture where people are taught that pride in thei country is to be destroyed and that in itself removed one of the basic aspect always ruling New Zealand rugby for mor t han a century. Children in schools are aught beleif in individual countries is an abomination and support fpr rugby weakened drastically. Witha small population and limited feeder capacity that was a fatal attack on rugby. in New Zealand.
New Zealand rugby on school level deteriorated badly as a result of both cultural and distraction issues like video and other games, In New Zealand school rugby and Under 20 rugby deteriorated badly and nothing was really done to correct the situation. So the article quoted is true, Ne Zalnd rugby can pay players more if they allowed their top players to earn mega income by laying club rugby in Europe and Japan releasing money to make money available for ebtter salaries of local players - but New Zealnd Rugby is headstrong in opposing it, It si too late to tr and get ther ther subsidy in Super Rugby back. So New Zealand Rugby went down financially anyway.
The issue that saved Rugby in South Africa happened rather suddenly in 2018 in SA. Rugby used to be a quota sport in SA with few black and colourd players playing Springbok rugby in SA. Since then the number of Black and colored palyers playing rugby on franchise and national level increasd on a major scale and rugby became one issue where the majority of people of all races became supporters and the feeder chain of players became massive.
Another major issue is pumping of R3 billion per year into school rugby in S A. The money comes from parents - and smaller local bussineses and ex-pupils. There are no other country in the world that have such a feeder system.
Government interference causes disruptions in team selections for sport cadres like Cricket and soccer - but they are very careful of interfering in rugby selections because it is going to cost them votes they cannot afford to lose,
,
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Gregor Paul: Heavy defeat to Australia raises questions over NZ’s rugby development system - Opinion
Opinion by
Gregor Paul
Rugby analyst·NZ Herald·
30 Sep, 2025 05:53 PM6 mins to read
Rugby analyst and feature writer
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THE FACTS
If there is anyone clinging to the hope that New Zealand’s high-performance system is not on the verge of a major meltdown, the quite astonishing result out of Canberra where the national schools’ team were beaten 81-48, should be seen as the canary in the mine.
The concession... of 81 points to Australia Under-18 is not something that can be easily explained or dismissed as an aberration, but should instead be viewed as the necessary evidence to question the long-standing conviction New Zealand holds in its innate ability to produce preternaturally gifted players who effortlessly and organically develop pass and catch skills which are the envy of the world.
There’s always been reason to believe New Zealand does brilliance by osmosis – that the lifestyle, climate and overbearing pull of rugby naturally leads children outside to pass, catch and kick balls for hours on end.
The All Blacks genius and accuracy in exploiting space is not grafted on the training fields of professional clubs, but instead in school playgrounds, backyards, local parks, fallow paddocks and – much to the annoyance of parents – hallways and bedrooms.
The high-performance system has typically not been a place to upskill the elite, but to refine their strategic understanding of the game and learn how to use their vast portfolio of natural skills in context.
A decade or so ago, the All Blacks would regularly find that the Northern Hemisphere sides and South Africa probably bettered them for technical proficiency at set-piece, but the advantage those countries could accrue there was never great enough to outweigh the value of New Zealand’s natural affinity to execute the core skills of pass, catch, run and kick under pressure.
Titanic physical battles would play out, but in the end, the All Blacks almost always won courtesy of their naturally higher skill levels; they could improvise a pass, offload out of contact or pick an impossibly clever running line.
The All Blacks are effectively the apex of a development system that starts with eight-year-olds killing time in parks and ends with players like Christian Cullen twisting George Gregan into knots at Carisbrook.
But the scale of the New Zealand Schools defeat – and it comes after losing to Australia last year, too – is reason enough to wonder if rugby has squashed its talent pipeline because it has fallen victim to socio-demographic and technological change, as well as to the hubris of schools and their incessant desire to professionalise sport and play to the egos of a generation of misguided parents who have sucked up Disney’s saccharine messaging that everyone has greatness within them.
New Zealand’s population has been on a small but steady urbanisation grind for the past 30 years. Specifically, more people are flowing into Auckland and other major cities, where green spaces are harder to find, entertainment and sporting options are greater and economic pressures to find work and contribute to the family household are real.
While it’s not measurable, there has to be a strong likelihood that not as many kids while away as many hours as they once did throwing a rugby ball around – and of course there is modern slavery to the algorithmic forces of social media.
It seems a safe bet that most teenagers spend more time with an iPhone in their hand than they do a rugby ball, and the loss of those informal skill-development hours must be hurting New Zealand’s elite rugby fraternity somehow.
But the bigger problem highlighted by the 81-48 defeat in Canberra is the pervasion of adult vanity and ambition into the world of children’s sport, and this mad desire to treat First XV rugby as the first rung of the professional ladder instead of a supporting pillar in an holistic education.
Where once First XV coaching was the domain of teachers, it is now the place for ambitious former players to start the next stage of their careers.
They come in as directors of rugby, out-earning qualified teachers, typically with a licence to run roughshod over academic commitments or other interests players may have.
There’s an incentive for these people to not act in the wider interests of the school, but rather to hog the best athletes, make them commit exclusively to rugby and play no other sport, and ultimately be judged not on the experience they provide and the overall roundedness and life-readiness of the young men they produce, but exclusively on the results they achieve.
Results matter because so many schools use sporting prestige to sell themselves to prospective parents. For the coaches, their time in charge of a First XV is their ticket to a Super Rugby coaching role.
Dante would recognise that there is another circle of Hell in this inferno, which is the culture of entitlement it has fostered within the playing cohort, who have come to believe that their games should be filmed, if not televised nationally, so they can create the visual collateral they need to secure an agent and a professional contract.
There’s also a fully endorsed social-media world where schools themselves pump out content celebrating this and that, and while it’s no doubt not their intention to inflate the egos and distort the perceptions of their pupils about how good they are, anyone with an ounce of common sense would deduce that will be an inevitable byproduct.
It is, of course, a mass generalisation to say that the aspiring teenage All Black of today is too busy attending to their Instagram account and discussing their pathway with their agent to spend time refining the critical acts of pass and catch, but then again, the result from Canberra suggests that maybe it’s not.
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.