In relation Mo’unga, it’ll be interesting to see how much of this is real and how it is Lendrum talking it up, given that Lendrum was immediately responsible for the failure to retain Mo’unga, even if Foster and Hansen are ultimately responsible for his departure.

When Mo’unga signed for Japan I assumed he was sick of being a scapegoat for Foster’s and Hansen’s failure as coaches, and also sick of being targeted in International rugby by cheap shots after he had kicked and passed, something that has become a disease at all levels of the game.

A three year deal with Toshiba said “I’m done” with international rugby, though it would have allowed him to return for the 2026 international season and world cup year even he signed with NZR for after the end of J1 in 2026. Maybe that is what it will resolve itself into anyway. He gets paid big bucks, takes time out from getting the bash, comes back for one last shot with the AB’s after signing with NZR for 2026 onward, which gives Lendrum something to announce. Or maybe he signs for 2025 with NZR, trades a year off his contract now for a re-sign with Toshiba 2028 onwards. Difficult to know, given all the other moving parts in the NZ-Japan relationship.

That sounds reasonable OB, if we didn’t have the experience of the last five years and the last 8 months in particular to illustrate something very different. Irrespective of what you or I or anyone else believes, NZRUPA has no faith in the current board. There is good reason for that. The list of the boards failures over the last five years is extremely long and damaging. It is held in contempt both nationally and internationally. What credibility does it have when faced with the fundamental reform of the game in NZ? For NZRUPA, they have none.

But the deal breaker for NZRUPA is that the NZR board has now, yet again, been shown to be little more than a servant of the PU’s. This is all of them, with only Reddy a genuine exception. Balsingham, there till the end of 2024, Young, there till the end of 2025, and Mather, there till the end of 2026, are all men who are the embodiment of provincial conservatism, and they are on the board. Will men like that put the PU’s in their place? Will even Mackey and Palmer, who have either been behind or stood by one dismal NZR board decision over the last five years. Again, NZRUPA don’t think so. And its the professional players everyone pays to see, not the politicians.

Problem is, OB, that the existing board members are not willing to stand down until their individual terms are up irrespective of what happens. Even Reddy has been trying to defend them on that basis, insisting that all board members will be up for renewal/slated for departure in two years. None, other than Reddy, have committed themselves to resign if provincial delegates are imposed on the board.

Whether the board members are refusing to leave immediately because they want to be part of board that, once it is finally free of a PU veto on meaningful change in NZ rugby, makes those meaningful changes, or because they believe they will individually have a better chance of get on an independently selected board as a sitting member, is impossible to know. What is absolutely clear though is other than Reddy, as well as Mackie and Palmer, who have led the way with the principled stand of the MAB on the reforms, they are all acting in self interest or ego. Just like the majority of PU’s.

NZRUPA has repeated their demand for the board to stand down because it would force a decision on the reforms [one that has been avoided for 8 months in a classic example of ultra-conservative delaying tactics] and present the majority of PU turkeys with in either having to vote for Christmas or the terrifying possibility [for everyone] of them taking charge of the whole business. The days of the PU’s controlling who gets on the board, controlling what that board does, then complaining when the incompetence than have imposed screws up, are over. This is the endgame.

How this plays out all depends in the end whether the majority of PU’s are willing to trigger an all out war with the professional players and with almost all the larger unions in order to continue to impose their incompetence. NZRUPA, having started this process, is simply doing its best to in fact have it carried through and not end up in the same dead end as all the other reforms over the last twenty or so years. We will see.

The politics of this are fascinating, given that RUPA [the NZ professional players union] are the only participant in this fight possessed of any competence or vision for the game, and the only one that is unified. That’s been vividly demonstrated by their opposition to the extremes of the Silver Lake PE deal and their initiation of this review, a review that might actually lead to real change, much to the regret of the ultra-conservatives who run the game at the moment. Everyone else is not only incompetent as ever, they are also divided, both amongst themselves and each other.

The NZR board, the majority of which were part of every brainless decision made since the 2019 World Cup, are divided between those who support the dead hand of the Provincial unions and their desire to retain control of the board and therefore the game, those who want the reforms to go through in a way that allows them to see out their term on the board, and the chair, Reddy, who is the only one to make a principled stand against threaten resignation if the reforms aren’t accepted in their basic form.

The provincial unions are in turn divided between those who want to accept the reforms, [primarily the SR hosts Canterbury, Auckland, Waikato, Otago and others] and I suspect would be happy to see the existing board go immediately because of all their blundering over the last 4 years, and the real dead heads in New Zealand rugby [Wellington, unions in the lower reaches of the NPC, and the Heartland unions] all of which are desperately trying to hold onto their position in the game. And this is despite the massive cost the current setup is imposing, and the gross ineficiency of it, with only 21% of Provincial spending going to the clubs/schools, the grassroots of the game.

So what’s next if the dead hands of the provincial unions continue to throttle the game in NZ and they refuse to accept the reforms? Reddy would resign if the Provincial unions attempt to retain control of the board succeeds, which would place an appalling amount of pressure on those left behind to resign. The provincial unions could openly split, with the SR host unions [other than Wellington, maybe] withdrawing from the NPC and running their own competition. The real nuke, a player strike, is at that point also a distinct possibility. Given the almost relentless incompetence of the NZR board and the Provincial unions since the game went professional, such lethal consequences are a real possibility.

It’ll be fascinating.

I’ll be interesting how the NZR restructures the PD systems once they get a new board. From what I can see all the NPC teams except North Harbour have an academy, but they have often been running at cross purposes with the local SR team. Down south is the poster child of how not to run things, with Otago and Southland arguing with the Highlanders about who to select and how to run their academies for decades. They seem to have got themselves together now, but its thirty years late, and they can’t be allowed to go backwards.
I don’t think centralisation is a good idea, or even plausible, but NZR will have to make sure that the local SR teams are absolutely in charge of the process in each academy. Again, what the Crusaders did in 2015 in turning the Canterbury and Tasman academies into Crusaders Academy [Christchurch] and Crusaders Academy [Nelson] is the gold standard. Everyone wins out of it. Since 2015 Tasman have produced dozens of SR players, something they didn’t in the first ten years of their existence, and 11 All Blacks whose starting province was Tasman, whereas before 2015 they had none. And since 2015 they’ve also won two NPC’s and produced two top tier coaches in Goodman and MacDonald. None of this is a coincidence.

Yeah, nice to see the boys get off the mark. Penney finally had the sense to dump Heinz, get Hotham in, [Drummond’s got Covid it seems] let Hophepa actually run the team and not have a 2nd five trying to run the team from midfield. The nightmare part of the draw is over [four of their five hardest games in the first six rounds], its probably too late for top 4, but if they keep trusting the young players the year will be rough but worthwhile. And hopefully a massive reload in 2025 a whole of flash young backs coming through. As for this year, I’m picking a Hurricanes v Chiefs final, I suspect in Welly. Two games between them in the rounds to go though, which will be epic, so we will see.

As for the politics, which is the most important thing to win, hopefully Reddy will be able to divide and outsmart the fishheads stuck in the fifties. Look for a Players rebellion and a split between the major unions and the rest if the head in the sand brigade dont cooperate. The idea that Canterbury and Auckland [who support the reforms] are going to be told what to do by a bunch of Heartland unions is laughable.

Brilliant article, another that shows exactly where excellence and achievement lies. And its not amongst the lowest common denominator.

What’s happened in Italian rugby, where non-existent player development led to decades of humiliation, and then the reverse, where proper PD has given them a strong U20’s team and an Italian national team with real power, is the perfect example of what can happen when you get it right. Sadly, those currently running the game in Italy have learnt nothing from that, or don’t care. Too busy taking credit for the wine they are drinking to make any. Fishheads are the same the world over. But then in about five years that will show up as the perfect counter-example.

The same struggle is playing out in NZ as well as Australia. The mediocrities [otherwise known as the majority of the provincial unions] are clinging to the NPC as a top tier comp, though thankfully they have already lost the struggle over PD to the SR teams. The only real question is how much damage they will do in dragging out their losing fight.

But that’s the thing. With the way things are now, with the Chiefs PD programme up and running and looking to reload, the Blues PD programme in a better state than it has been in the professional era [though some of Cotter’s choices are questionable, so we’ll see] the Hurricanes PD near instantly snapping into shape at the top level at least with a new coach, and even the Highlanders finally getting off their backsides and doing PD [for the first time in their near thirty year existence], the scope for the Crusaders to make mistakes with PD is far, far less.

Just beleiving that it will somehow just “come right” is magical thinking of the worst sort. The Crusaders U20’s won the national comp on Saturday, playing really well balanced and mature rugby, so the talent is there, and across all postions, but you still have a coaching group who is good enough to recognise and then manage it properly. The good thing is the current hole the Crusaders have dug for themselves is forcing even the most reluctant and bigoted to recognise just how good Robertson and Ryan and Hansen are.

Sort of. The players currently being used are as talented as any group in the country, but they lack experience. Fita Sa and Cunningham-South, even if they had been kept, are both only 21, as are Taula and Holland, so the short term difference wouldn’t be great. But the group coming through at the moment is, collectively, one dimensional, with no tall locks and no explosive loose forwards. Both are risky propositions, but also vital. And the cupboard is bare.

CUW, you’re right and wrong about the locks. The wrong is the idea that Barrett, Taylor, Hannah and Gallagher are “3 to 4 inches shorter” than Strange. Hannah is the same height, Taylor half a inch shorter, Barrett and Gallagher an inch shorter. Ignore the wikipedia height/weight figures for Hannah and Gallagher. They are from when they were schoolboys. The problem wasn’t the lack of height on the lineout in comparison with the Blues, Tuipolotu and McWhannell are the same height and Grace is NZ’s best non-lock lineout forward, it was the dismal calling and Bell getting the yips. Both are very fixable, though only if the coaching is good enough. Strange is certainly valuable, but primarily for his maturity, not his height as such.

Where you are right is that the Crusaders have left themselves without a genuinely tall Whitelock/Rettalick sized lock, which is remarkable given of the 6 around 6ft 8″ NZ locks in NZ’s SR teams, Darry, Lord, Taula, Tucker, Holland and Parkinson, 3 of them are born and bred Cantabrians, Darry, Taula, and Tucker, while Holland went to Christchurch Boy’s High when he arrived from the Netherlands. There are reasons/excuses for teh deperature of all these players, but for me what is even more disturbing is the loss of Fiti Sa, a genuinely massive, athletic, middle of the lineout lock, 6ft 8″, 125kg, lost from the Crusaders academy system last year. Sa is, from what I can see, the most talented no 5 in the country. His departure to Taranaki/Chiefs is, frankly, a disaster for the Crusaders, and could be one of the magnitude of the loss of Rettalick, another Canterbury boy who went north. The five locks are all every much of the same, which is poorly thought out.

Almost all the talk about the Crusaders development system has been either blind adulation or whining resentment. What’s gone missing in all this are the misses, where real talent is simply ignored by the Crusaders. Cunningham-South, now playing for England, a huge, dynamic No 8 who came to Christchurch from Auckland, was also missed by the Crusaders. Not great, particularly, where the players the Crusaders seem to be missing are the sort of players that are so vital to their success.

Don’t you hate when you see/get told about a mistake long after it can be edited away? Cheers, OB, definitely Zarn Sullivan. One of the few Auckland players I’ve seen over the last decade or so that leads, rather than someone who needs to be led. Don’t agree about it all being on Razor though. McKenzie will have to take it to the line, and he will have to endure the sort of cheap shots that have effectively driven small 10’s out of the international game.

Not that I want to cheer the Hurricane’s on, but Cameron is a handbrake. He is extraordinarily mechanical, doesn’t challenge the line and can’t pick out runners. The argument is that is what the Hurricanes need after years of flakey five eighths, but put him under real pressure and he comes apart. Which is why he didn’t make it in Canterbury/Crusaders. Love, with proper investment, is a championship winning five eighth. Hen’s teeth. And Williams is a real leader, a man who competes ferociously, the sort who could dominate the Blue’s if he was allowed to. And i don’t think McKenzie wil survive 4 years of international rugby at 10, no matter how brave he is.

Whole point of this article gets lost when you consider that Mo’unga seems not to want to play for All Blacks. That’s why he signed a three year deal in a place that would disqualify him from AB selection, even before he knew who the next AB coach would be. He seems to have got sick of the whole circus of international rugby, the abuse directed at him for being selected by NZ “fans”, the fact of being coached by a coach in a steep decline who never wanted him in the first place [Hansen, 2018-2019] or a mediocrity shuffling players and coaches around in a desperate attempt to find a winning formula [Foster 2020-2023], and used as a scapegoat for their failures.

At the age on 29 with at best only one world cup left in him when he is 33, and with most of his explosiveness gone by then, he seems also sick of being a punching bag, a target for all the late hits that came his way during his time in test rugby as the cheap shot merchants sought to bludgeon a player who could rip them apart if they were forced to play legally. He’s a good family man, wants to be in one piece for his children as they grow up, not the object of hate, physical and verbal, he has become for so many people in the game. I have little doubt NZ has seen the last of him. That’s the way it goes. Chalk another casualty up to the dead hands of Tew, Hansen, Henry and Foster.

The real issue is the future. McKenzie? Maybe, though he doesn’t need to be undermined like Mo’unga was with the two playermaker BS, and as a smaller man he will be targeted for cheap shots in exactly the same Mo’unga was. Barrett? Three world cups, never the first choice 10, and at the age of 36 at the next world cup, never will be. Perofeta, Cameron or Ioane? Dear god, no. All of them have a long history of failing under pressure. Zarn Williams? He would be my go to if I was the Blue’s coach. But then Love would be my choice if I was Hurricane’s coach. Young guys like Kemara, Morgan, Cashmore, Godfrey, Millar, Jacomb and Faleafaga? Time will tell, but other than Millar all are on the small side. There is a group of bigger, older players, Reihana, Burke and Trask, all of whom look physically better equipped to put up with the bludgeoning of international rugby, though none have that spark of brilliance the AB’s expect. So my choice for first squad of season would be McKenzie, Love and Williams.

And a pick for the future? Cooper Grant, son of NZ softball great Marty Grant, currently leading the Crusader’s U20’s into the final of Super Rugby U20’s. A Tasman boy with time, control skill, size, speed and vision. Easily the best in NZ at U20’s, the Crusaders U20’s look very different when Grant is not on the field. You heard it here first.

They will. And with a point to prove. The SRP organisers can only stick a knife into them for so long.

It’s entirely possible the Crusaders will be none from 6 after they play the Chiefs in Christchurch on March 29th, and the SRP organisers will certainly have got what they planned for.

It was always going to be a tough year with all the player and coaching losses, with a semi-final a good result, but why the Crusaders board accepted such an abysmal draw, I do not know. Penney has been given zero time to reshape the team, and has effectively been thrown to the dogs by the SRP organisers and by his own management.

The Crusaders have to play the Chiefs twice in the first six rounds, as well as the Blues and the Hurricanes, meaning two thirds of their kiwi derbies by just over a third of the way through the comp. They also have had to play the Drua in Fiji in March, the hardest non-Kiwi away game in the comp, and for a second year in a row. By the end of the ninth round the Crusaders will have played just two home games, with five away games, a game against an Australian team in Australia and a bye making up the balance. The SRP organisers really couln’t have made it any harder for the Crusaders.

Thing is, the competition organisers hate the Crusaders fans as much as they hate the Crusaders team. Despite the known problems for fans with playing in Christchurch in late Autumn and Winter, four of the six scheduled home games are being played in the last third of the comp, the coldest part of the year. Not happy with killing off the Crusaders, the organisers have targeted their fans as well.

Good to see “fan-centric” decision making is just as much of a fraud as all the other rhetoric out of the SRP organisers.

That logic is all your own, nothing to do with me.

The relevant figures for working out the significance of each countries potential revenue for their primary football code in their own country are each countries GDP in their own dollars compared with the overall revenue in that country of the pay TV currently televising their sport in their own dollars. AFL, NRL and NZR are after all being paid in the own dollars.

$2500 billion AU GDP
$0400 billion NZ GDP

$3.97 billion AU Foxtel revenue
$0.75 billion NZ Sky NZ revenue

Those are the latest figures. Australia has an economy has 6.1 times that of NZ, dollar for dollar, and Foxtel has revenue 5.3 times that of Sky NZ, dollar for dollar.

Those figures reveal that NZers spend even more on pay TV than Australian’s relative to the size of their own economies, and the overall expenditure almost exactly matches the difference in population, Australia being 5.05 times of NZ. The difference in pay TV revenue is the most instructive.

My contention that NZ rugby therefore being, with a proper format, worth a fifth in NZ dollars in NZ of what NRL and AFL combined is worth in Australia in Australia in Australian dollars, so around NZ $200m p.a. rather than NZ $100 p.a., is therefore directly relevant. It has nothing to do with the comparative size of the economies. That means nothing. It is how much their own countries public is willing to pay for those sports in their own money.

Your second contention, that the 400 game AFL/NRL programme would have to matched in NZ to generate the same revenue makes two really basic analytical mistakes. The first is failing to recognise that the primary driver of subscriptions in the subscribers own team, not the rest of the teams in the comp. Once that subscriber can watch their own team often enough, then the rest of the comp is a bonus. How many games does anyone watch in a weekend? Who watches all the games in the NRL every weekend? Or AFL?

As long as NZ Rugby could provide 4 games a weekend for 20 to 25 weekends a season featuring all the best players available in the country then that would drive subscriptions rather better than one or two local derbies and NZ v Aussie games in SRP for 14 weekends a season, then 7 local derbies for 10 weekends a year in NPC. Having a guaranteed NZ v NZ playoffs and final every year would also be far more valuable.

But the fundamental mistake you make is failing to recognise that pay TV subscriptions for rugby in NZ are driven by the All Blacks. Think State of Origin in terms or ratings/revenue driving, but around 12 times a year, not 3. Dont need 400 games a year to get those sort of subscriptions.

So how much will Sky NZ pay to keep NZ rugby in a world when NZR has choices, particularly given the reality that the loss of which would destroy the company in the same way the loss of AFL and NRL would destroy Foxtel? Comparatively as much Foxtel pays the AFL and NRL? Come up with the right format, and that is entirely possible.

To be honest, I get the feeling very soon Aussie rugby will not have a choice. The idea that NZ rugby will stand by Aussie rugby irrespective of its performance is just fantasy.

I don’t know how exactly change is going to happen, but it will happen. There is now universal acceptance that NZ cannot sustain 20 domestic pro-rugby teams. There is a recognition that older players who dont have a place in SR should not be paid anything like they have been to play in NPC. NPC budgets are collapsing as the majority of provinces focus on the Community game and player development rather than a desperate and futile attempt to promote the game through winning, which is a zero sum game.

There is also universal recognition that player development should be only run through fully professional setups [the SR teams] rather trying to do it through small, part time provincial setups. All the provincial academies are, as a consequence, slowly being realigned to the local SR team. Typically the Crusaders started the process years ago and the others are having to catch up. The national U20’s comp is now based on SR teams in the year of the world cup, not U19 provincial teams from the year before.

My guess is that teh first thing that will happen is that Moana Pasifika will get taken over by NZR, and reinvented to be much more a part of the NZ system. It cannot succeed without integration. MP is fundamentally different from the Drua, which is based in Fiji and paid for by the Fijian and Australian governments. Once NPC becomes like the Currie Cup there will have to be another at where NZ’s best up and comers outside the existing SR squads will play. Failure to provide a place for them will see them gone overseas. France most likely. NZ rugby can’t sustain 20 domestic professional teams, but with good organisation it can sustain about 8.

Agreed, jeznez, there has always been Aussies who knew that shortcuts RA was taking would be a disaster, but the dominant tone on this forum from when I joined three years ago to now and the dominant decisionmaking of RA and the SR clubs [with the exception of the Brumbies] as you has been about everything other than player development. You used to be what Ireland are now, except better. Professionalism seems to have poisoned Aussie rugby when it should have only strengthened it. I just dont understand what happened, other than you surrendered yourself to teh quick fix. How can Aussie rugby have become the opposite of itself?

Personally, I get the feeling its all too late.

The point of the article is that Australian rugby has, for more than twenty years, looked for a sugar coated silver bullet to solve its problems. Its 5 SR teams, when the development/coaching is struggling with 3 teams. Magical thinking. Its the recruitment of NRL players, when Aussie rugby success 1979-2003 was founded on a competitive forward pack. More magical thinking. Its employ NZ coaches. Cynical thinking. They at least can be scapegoated when they fail to turn water into wine. Only now, twenty years late, does “everyone” finally recognise its all about player development. Yet the sugar coated silver bullets keep flying, with competition restructures suddenly all in vogue.

Careful what you wish for Aussie rugby, you might just get it. Three massive changes are coming ot NZ rugby. First, there is a governance overhaul, which will lead to second, the move to have NPC turned purely into a feeder comp with no fulltime SR players, who will instead be playing in different competitions. NZ SR teams will move to 20 to 25 scheduled matches a year. What Aussie SR teams will be doing who knows, but NZ will look after itself. It might even create more NZ SR teams in order to give more scope to player development with the downgrade of the NPC. Here’s hoping. And that will lead into the renegotiation of the TV rights deal. The assumption is that NZR will get less, but between them NRL and AFL get more than $1 billion AU out of Foxtel. Why, with a properly structured comp, shouldn’t NZR get close to NZ $200 million for a market a fifth of the size, twice what its getting at the moment?

With the threat of NZR+ in the background, Sky NZ might just have to cough up.

“You choose 4 teams and say: we can only support 4, and everyone believes it. You choose 7 teams and say: we can only support 7, and everyone believes it.”

That sums it up. All to accurately. No planning, no vision, no idea.

Nothing about the expansion from the original Super 12 has ever made any sense to me.

Why has NZ never sought more teams, even though they have ended in the bizzare situation of SR players having to go and play for a different domestic team after SR? There is no other professional sport in the world that insists their players play for two domestic teams. Its an expensive and incoherent mess.

Agreed about Aussie expansion. The NRL has one genuine project team, the Storm. SR Aussie, which is about a quarter of the size of the NRL by most measures, has two. That’s nuts. SR Aussie needed to expand with NSW and Queensland first, get a better base, then go for their big adventure. it also needed to aggressively co-opt the Pasifika teams, particularly Fiji, in order to bulk up.

SA should have pushed for 6 teams early on, co-opted Argentina straight away, and built a competition that strengthened the Currie Cup rather than killed it. In short, the southern hemisphere should by now have three primary competitions based on NZ, OZ and SA, and a champions league. Just like the Northern Hemisphere does.

And as for North vs South game, dont get me started. Why such a valuable product has been allowed to languish for thirty years is utterly beyond me. But then NSWRL didn’t want State of Origin, did they?

If it was up to me, I would go for 10 NZ SR teams, which would have population base of around 500,000 each if you ensured all the heartland unions were amalgmated into the larger unions around them.

Otago/Southland
Canterbury
Tasman/Hawkes Bay
Wellington
Manawatu/Taranaki
Bay of Plenty
Waikato
Counties Manukau/South Auckland [New team carved off Auckland]
Auckland
North Harbour/Northland

Effectively it would be a Super NPC, which is what I expected NZR to drive for all those years ago. Sadly though I am not the emperor of NZ rugby, and given the overcautious and incoherent nature of the people who run the game, I’m expecting them to keep it as 5 SR teams in the short term, then add teams as the pressure comes on them from the stronger unions excluded from the top tier as the NPC is subordinated.

I dont think NZR will be willing to stretch to any more than 8 teams.

When you look at a more mature contact sports environment, like Australia, you can see why. Australia has 5 times the population as NZ, and 39 contact sports clubs, 18 AFL, 16 NRL, 5 SRP, so the figure for sustainability NZ should be looking at is 8.

5 SRP and 1 NRL are already in place. The question is, can NZR kill off the Warriors? Even though the Warriors survive purely because of the generosity of its owner that would be difficult. The crucial thing is not to have the NRL expand in NZ. The best way of preventing that is to develop a genuinely vibrant domestic scene. At least 6, maybe 7 or 8 SR teams gives NZ the opportunity to dominate in a way that the mess has evolved has not dominated for almost twenty years.

My picks would be another team in Auckland, then a Northern Districts team [Northland, Bay of Plenty] and a Central districts team [Taranaki, Manawatu, Hawkes Bay.] All would have a population base of more than 600,000 and established pathways through NPC teams. Its just a question of how brave the new leadership of NZR is willing to be.

The only place NZ rugby would suffer financially if it limited or limited its involvement with Aussie SR are the sponsorships at SR level, which seem to have a significant Aussie component built in. Nobody has ever demonstrated how NZ rugby would suffer in TV revenue from producing more, higher rated domestic product. On the contrary, all teh evidence is that it would gain. I’m starting to wonder if the South Africans are starting to come to the same conclusion.

The real question though, which the author didn’t want to touch, is how all this blends in with the looming and I suspect quite radical reform of NZ domestic rugby. The rationale for not expanding NZ SR footprint has always been the NPC, that more NZ SR teams weren’t needed because players could be developed in the NPC. But if the NPC is no longer fit for purpose as a commercial product, and it isn’t, and becomes purely a feeder comp, as it will, then where are all the players going to develop if NZ SR teams play full season, taking that colossal amount of talent out of the NPC? More slots will be available in existing teams, but there just wont be enough teams for all the talent coming through. The only place to go is more NZ SR teams.

As for the idea those players could be attracted to Aussie through making all SR players eligible for their national teams irrespective of where they play, that idea seems to have died a death.