Looking back over the past week and to the weeks ahead - to rate the noteworthy, the cringeworthy, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the truly amazing. Rugby World Cup 2023 and it's wide open Next weekend the Rugby World Cup kicks off in France with the first game...
Looking back over the past weeks and to the weeks ahead – to rate the noteworthy, the cringeworthy, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the truly amazing. NBR deep sixing opinion columns The New Zealand Herald reported last week that the NBR (National Business Review)...
When I wore a younger man's clothes I dabbled with playing rugby. For most of my childhood I'd played football, or soccer, as Kiwis call it. I had my masculinity attacked. Other kids hassled me and mockingly asked if I kissed and hugged the other players, as that's...
Is there anything that raises the ire of certain Northern Hemisphere rugby critics and fans more than the All Blacks' haka? Whenever the World Cup rolls around it's always the same, tired, ignorant, and insensitive criticisms of a tradition of our game that has been...
All Blacks fans are a tough crowd and it’s getting all a little tedious. Two games against Australia in the past two weeks saw two fantastic contests– one a comprehensive, record-breaking loss for the men in black, the other a complete turnaround where they played the...
There's been a lot of talk recently about Eden Park. The future of the stadium is in serious doubt and requires substantial financial investment and support. Auckland ratepayers are being asked to take on $40 million in existing debt and $64 million maintenance costs...
It really is the strangest thing when the most successful team in world sport comes under so much attack, after a few less than stellar performances. It’s stranger still when that team is the All Blacks and those leading the charge to put the boot in are so called All...
By virtue of its phenomenal ratio of wins against losses and draws, the All Blacks are the most successful team in sports. The New Zealand rugby public has become so used to their national team beating other nations in test matches that losses are considered too much...
In the history of All Blacks rugby it’s harder to find a more hard done by player than Keith Murdoch. His dismissal while on tour in the UK in 1972 for punching a security guard at a hotel in Cardiff is remarkable, not only for the severity of the punishment he...
A renowned writer once famously wrote that there's no such thing as a second act in American lives - meaning that it's not possible to change, to reinvent, to forge a new path. F Scott Fitzgerald's epigram isn't a truism and wasn't intended to be. Reinvention is part...