Hamish Bidwell: The continued disregard for women’s rugby

Opinion – I’d like to believe that New Zealand Rugby’s (NZR) intentions are good.

I’d like to believe that they value women’s rugby and respect the players and genuinely want to promote the game.

I’d like to believe the staging of Super Rugby Aupiki is more than just a box-ticking exercise.

I’d like to believe that NZR’s broadcast partner, Sky, and other media outlets aren’t just paying lip service to female players.

But when the competition is just three games long, and when the Hurricanes Poua have one of those games cancelled because of a Covid outbreak in the camp, then I have my doubts.

Doubts that are only heightened when the Hurricanes’ Super Rugby Pacific team have the same Covid crisis, but their scheduled match for this week is merely postponed.

A bit has been made of a tweet sent out by NZR this week, to ostensibly celebrate International Women’s Day, and two of the players who were in it.

That’s dim. You don’t put Sevu Reece in anything that’s meant to honour women. You just don’t.

I’ve given Reece’s history a pretty thorough going over on this website previously and, frankly, don’t have the energy to do it again.

While the tweet has been deleted and an apology given, featuring him in this particular tweet was distasteful and dumb and shows just how divorced from reality NZR can be.

Same with Aaron Smith, whose family are occasionally used as a prop.

Now Smith, who is one of the finest All Blacks halfbacks we’ve ever seen, may be a dutiful husband and a doting father. And the more his family is wheeled out, the more that image is reinforced.

It’s just that, as we saw when he too featured in this particular tweet, not everyone was convinced.

Again, though, that smacks of an organisation that’s out of touch. I don’t think there’s anything sinister in it, just a lack of awareness about how these players are actually perceived beyond the ivory tower of NZR HQ.

But the cancellation of the Hurricanes Poua game and the token nature of Super Rugby Aupiki, that’s another thing entirely.

Sky are almost as culpable. There’s almost more promos for Super Rugby Aupiki on their network than there are matches on the schedule.

The Chiefs and the Blues played a one off women’s Super Rugby match in May last year.
Photo: Photosport

The same in print, where we get flattering profiles of players but no actual demand for a legitimate competition for them to play in or condemnation of Hurricanes Poua versus Blues Women being called off.

I mean it’s not like these players have a packed schedule. Many will have no commitments once Super Rugby Aupiki is done, so surely another time could be found to play that match?

After all, heaven and earth will be moved to make up Moana Pasifika’s postponed Super Rugby Pacific games, along with the latest Hurricanes one.

That’s what gets my goat about NZR and the people who do puff pieces on their behalf.

We cannot continue to treat female players as second class. We cannot continue to say the right things about how highly they’re valued and then not match those words with actions.

We cannot continue to disregard a side of the game that may end up saving rugby, in time.

Women’s sport is the future. It is untapped. It is where the main area for growth is and the mechanism by which various codes could be able to sustain themselves.

Rugby playing numbers, for instance, are hardly going through the roof. That’s why so much junior footy is of the 10 a-side variety, with uncontested scrums and the like.

Heck, NZR actually passed legislation for adult club rugby, in every grade below premier, to go the same route. In some smaller provincial unions even premier footy can be played by children’s’ rules, so competitions can continue.

And here we have these supremely gifted and charismatic female players, with the potential to inspire thousands of girls around the country to play as well, and we treat them like this? It’s madness.

Women’s rugby won’t save men’s club rugby. It won’t provide six clubs in a competition where only four or five exist, but it does have the potential to offset the dwindling player pool in the male game.

I’ve written before that if a sport dies at the grassroots, then it dies full stop. Well rugby is dying and yet no-one at NZR seems to realise that it’s women’s rugby that can save it.

Far from being a nuisance, to be briefly endured and then forgotten, Super Rugby Aupiki should just about be the centrepiece of the domestic schedule.

That tweet with Reece and Smith in it was laughable, actually. I mean was there no adult in the room able to say “hang on, maybe they’re not the best options available.”

But Super Rugby Aupiki is a calculated slight. That is a result of a governing body and a broadcaster making a conscious decision about what they think women’s rugby is worth.

And, from this distance, that doesn’t look like much.