John Campbell: May Moana Pasifika shine tonight, despite the unlevel playing field

OPINION: I'll watch tonight's Super Rugby game with mixed emotions, writes John Campbell. Because my love of the game feels tainted by empty platitudes and enduring inequality for Pacific players.

Rugby is special to me.

My Dad, who died in 2017, worked ridiculously hard, and I now think leisure time felt like an extravagance to him. But two or three times a season we would go to Athletic Park. “The men together," he’d say, even though I was a boy. And those hours felt golden.

When my best friend, Tim, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, we went to the World Cup in Japan. It was our last trip away together. And it was sad and precious and beautiful and golden.

When my son was growing up, he played for Ponsonby then for his school. In the sixth grade, his team went through the season undefeated to win the Auckland grade. He was halfback. Like TJ. We need to make sport less serious for our children, but that season felt almost sacred. At a 21st birthday party I went to recently, three of his teammates referred to it in their speeches. The years pass. And we find new hills to climb. But the view back on that wonderful winter will forever be golden.

But of late, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I’ve felt a slight sense of estrangement creeping in.

The Black Ferns saved me. When they won the World Cup at Eden Park, and I was there, and Stacey Fluhler laughed and waved as she left the field with an injury, because she knew the joy was greater than the sadness, and Joanah Ngan-Woo won the lineout the Black Ferns were destined to lose, and the crowd went up and stayed up for minutes and minutes and minutes, and we were witnessing 50,000 people dance in their seats for women’s rugby, and it was golden.

But now? As the Super Rugby season kicks off? I feel… what?

Don’t get me wrong, if TJ scores, or the Hurricanes beat the Crusaders, I’ll still text my wonderful friend, Julian Wilcox, and he’ll text me back, and our texts will be absurdly happy. Like kids.

But the excitement, the anticipation, the desire to watch every game, has somehow abated.

And I wonder if it’s because rugby’s bosses insist the sport contorts itself into the kind of package beloved by corporate marketing people. A Tin Man sport, in search of a real heart.

This isn’t on the players. Bless them. Although a generation of them have been rendered almost speechless by media training which has taken their most unique commodity, themselves, and reassembled it as an endless game of cliché bingo. The poor bastards.

Again, this is where the Black Ferns save the game from itself. By being real. If only the bosses of the male game understood the power of that. What are they afraid of? That their players might be young and hopeful (and sometimes flawed) and human?

But more than that, I think what’s losing me is that for over a decade, rugby’s global governing body has been promising to do more to elevate Tier 2 rugby nations, and they haven’t. Not really.

Anyway, I had all of this in my head on Thursday when, for a few gorgeous hours, I became a 1News sports reporter.

It was one of those Auckland days in which the sun shone, and cars were actually moving on the motorway, and the combination of those two things felt so rare people were actually smiling at each other on the street.

I was going up to North Harbour Stadium, in Albany, to interview James Lay, the captain of Moana Pasifika, who play their first game of the season against the Highlanders in Dunedin, tonight.

If you’re not a dedicated rugby fan, Moana Pasifika are an almost romantic notion.

When the team was announced, back in 2021, World Rugby, with its propensity for claiming victory when the job is only just getting started, heralded the new franchise (alongside the Fijian Drua) as the “missing element”, that would allow “Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to retain the region’s best and brightest talent.”

Hey, Samoan and Tongan Cinderella, World Rugby’s got a glass slipper for you to try on!

And almost immediately, in fairy tale style, Moana Pasifika propelled a previously overlooked Levi Aumua into the global rugby spotlight, for which the team was rewarded by losing him to the Crusaders. C'est la vie in Pacific rugby. And who doesn’t want the Crusaders, a team that’s won more titles than Moana Pasifika have won games, to treat the new franchise as a Pak’n’Save?

That’s the dream, surely? Isn’t it?

Anyway, at the end of a tough season last year, I went to see Moana Pasifika. They flew out to Sydney immediately after I left, and won their only game of the season. Not only did they win it, they really looked like winners. It was magic. And then, of course, the season ended and it stopped, and here we are, starting over again.

But not.

When the squad of 38 was announced, it contained “twenty newly contracted players”. Twenty! Their head coach and their assistant coach are both new – Fa’alogo Tana Umaga and Tom Coventry.

They haven’t really got a home ground, although everyone’s pretending it’s Mt Smart.

And so, once again, a Pasifika rugby team is the poor kid in a competition in which the kind of stability, succession planning and genuine home advantage other teams quite reasonably take for granted isn’t theirs. Not to the same extent.

I asked James Lay about this.

James Lay is, by the way, a rugby player who seems to run no internal focus group when he answers questions. He just answers them. When the Black Ferns do this, as they so magnificently do, it feels sane and appropriate and right. When a male player does it, it feels almost revelatory. Dude, don’t you know you’re mean to say nothing?

And here’s the simple enchantment rugby’s corporate bosses are missing out on with their enforced, empty, robotic caution. Because he’s telling his own truth, James Lay doesn’t put a foot wrong. How can he? He’s speaking from his heart, and his heart is good.

I ask James Lay about being at Moana Pasifika – and also playing for Manu Samoa.

Because he’s come out of the Blues, where the players who excel will make the All Blacks, and he’s now playing for Moana Pasifika, where the players who excel will either get poached by a richer franchise or head to Tonga or Samoa (and, to a lesser extent, Fiji), James Lay can see the difference, and the difference is money.

If a player makes the All Blacks he gets a significant pay rise – sometimes a fortune, in the case of All Black megastars. If a player makes Samoa or Tonga, he probably takes a pay cut.

Which means that World Rugby’s claim that Moana Pasifika would be the “missing element”, retaining Pasifika players in New Zealand and the Pacific, is a convenient half-truth. The team may indeed do that, although there’s still way more money on offer in England, France and Japan. But Samoan and Tonga players are still required to do what All Blacks are not, make significant financial sacrifices to play for their country.

Manu Samoa, Tonga and Fiji play their international fixtures during a period which overlaps with New Zealand’s provincial rugby competition, the Bunnings Warehouse NPC.

If you’re an All Black, and playing your internationals at the same time, this isn’t an issue at all. No one would sacrifice a spot in the All Blacks to remain in what the players call “Bunnings”.

“We all want to play Bunnings," James Lay says. “But you’ve got your country there as well.”

Again, there’s no-one in the All Blacks having to make this choice.

“It makes it a tough decision for us, and we just get put in the middle of it. I’d love more players to put their hands up and play for Manu, or Tonga, or Fiji.”

“Where do you earn more money?”, I ask James Lay. “Bunnings or Manu Samoa?”

“It’s a bit touchy, but everyone knows you earn more money playing Bunnings.”

“Which is crazy," I reply. “So you actually have to take a pay cut to play for your country?”

“Yes, you do. And that’s the difficult situation players get put in, I guess. Which is a shame.”

The shame is we don’t acknowledge this. That rugby still pretends it’s a level playing field, when it’s so manifestly not.

James Lay isn’t agitating, he isn’t complaining. He loves rugby, he loves playing it, he’ll manage the country versus pay-check balancing act as well as he can. But it shapes rugby’s outcomes, and here’s how.

After talking to James Lay, then watching Moana Pasifika train and feeling the delight and gentle envy I always feel as I watch people playing the game I last played when I was 28 and got a concussion so severe the doctor at Wellington Hospital told me that was that, I went in search of Manu Samoa’s schedule for 2024.

I wanted to see whether any Tier One nations were playing Samoa in Samoa. I wanted to see whether rugby’s home and away principal was actually, meaningfully, being applied.

Instead I saw this. It's a "job vacancy” ad, and the job is for “Manu Samoa Head Coach.”

But Manu Samoa have a head coach. It’s Vaovasamanaia Seilala Mapusua, one of the finest people I’ve met in the game, a brilliant, former midfielder, who played a staggering 250 games for Otago, the Highlanders and London Irish combined, and who was one of three players who so bravely spoke out on behalf of his Samoan teammates during the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

A leader? Yes.

Contracted to the end of this year? Yes.

But Samoa are in pursuit of the near impossible. A coach who can somehow take a team that is almost entirely not based in Samoa, a team that’s made up of players forced to travel the rugby world to earn a living, a team made up of players often taking a pay cut to be there, and a team made up of such disparate elements that when I was in the Manu Samoa camp just prior to the 2011 World Cup, I witnessed players who were about to play together for their country meeting each other for the first time.

And when they lose to Tier One nations, like New Zealand, whose players know each other like brothers and have probably being playing to together since age grade teams, and in Super Rugby teams, whose players are paid significantly more money, are not sacrificing any income to be there, and whose entire rugby lives have been a tightly controlled trajectory to exactly this point, it will be a miracle if they don’t lose.

And if they lose, it reinforces rugby’s power structures, and it’s years before they get another game against that Tier One team because, you know, they can’t compete. And on it goes. Endlessly. And a coach who somehow got the team to within one point, one heartbreaking point, of England at the 2023 World Cup, finds his job is being advertised.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been banging on about this for years. But we can’t stop banging on about it, until rugby does it better.

Rugby has to stop pretending it cares more than it does and that things are changing.

I wrote about this, last year, during the Rugby World Cup. Please forgive me if I quote myself: “In the first Rugby World Cup, in 1987, the eight quarter-finalists contained just one Tier Two team – Fiji. Thirty-six years later, in the 2023 Rugby World Cup, unless Japan beat Argentina, the eight quarter-finalists now look likely to contain just one Tier Two team – Fiji.”

Japan didn’t beat Argentina. Fiji was the only Tier Two quarter-finalist, exactly as they had been 36 years earlier.

World Rugby insists it’s supporting its Tier Two teams. And it is, more than it was, which is a low bar. But it’s not enough. And it still feels like window-dressing.

Again, I gave an example of this from the Rugby World Cup, last year: “After the Tonga-South Africa game, the two teams formed a circle and stood together, then knelt together. It was a special image. And it circulated far and wide as evidence of rugby's solidarity, and as emblematic of what's best in the game.

But here's what that image didn't reveal. And it's much more representative of the true state of global rugby. South Africa have played Tonga just three times in all of rugby history. And two of those games were forced upon South Africa by being at Rugby World Cups.

If Tier One teams really like standing in circles with players from Tier Two nations, maybe they could play them more often.”

Three times in all rugby history. Scraps, anyone?

I keep writing about this. Here, in 2021.

Which brings me back to where I started. To my love of rugby, my growing and sad estrangement from it, and my Thursday visit to see James Lay at Moana Pasifika training.

Here’s what I hope for. That tonight, against the odds, Moana Pasifika ascend the unlevel playing field and play magnificently against the Highlanders.

That when Moana Pasifika get a home game, wherever “home” is, people who love rugby turn out to support them, because the players deserve that, and to sell tickets is to survive.

And that when we talk about the global game, we understand the globe is still built to reflect the needs of rugby’s wealthiest nations. And that might glitter, but it isn’t gold.