Loose Pass

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with apparel issues, two eyes, recruitment and World Cup form notes…

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with apparel issues, two eyes, recruitment and World Cup form notes…

Seems it wasn't just London subjected to random acts of rioting, abuse and looting this week. In Auckland, several Adidas employees had branding removed from their vehicles after copping numerous verbal sideswipes from locals angry over the company's pricing policy for All Black World Cup jerseys.

There's the rioting and abuse, but the blame for looting can be laid squarely at the feet of Adidas, who have been attempting to coin in a thunderous NZ$220 for the replica jersey at local outlets. That's US$184, GBP 113… that's a lot of wonga. In fact – and on a par with lots of events in London this week – it is daylight robbery.

What's really irked Kiwis beyond the price is that you can snap up said jerseys for significantly less cash from sites abroad. It's cheaper to buy them from a US outlet and have them shipped over than it is to buy local. Adidas also caught onto this and attempted to block punters from using foreign sites, a ploy raising enough ire to see it quickly aborted.

There's a general feeling among Kiwi fans that the price they will end up paying to see their team lift the Webb Ellis trophy is becoming significantly higher than ought to be reasonable. Local prices for bars and restaurants have rocketed up over the past couple of years, among other aspects of cost of living.

Meanwhile those in charge of both the RWC and NZRU wax lyrical about 'commercial partners', 'product', 'brand' and 'customers', rarely bringing up the issues of 'sponsors', 'game', 'team' and 'fans'. NZRU CEO Steve Tew was vociferous in his defence of Adidas' pricing policy, when he must have seen that it made the jerseys unavailable to the common man. It's notable that, contrary to Tew's stance, most sports retail chains reacted to the furore by dropping their price appropriately.

When rugby went professional, a lot of things were destined to happen. Players would become prima donnas, money would be tight, certain aspects of the game's soul would end up sold to marketeers with as much intimate knowledge and feeling for rugby as a small gibbon.

But at the moment, even those who do know the game well are letting the fans down too often for comfort when it comes to things like this. Even more uncomfortably, the issue with the jerseys looks uncannily like the one that ripples soccer's waters annually. Shouldn't we be able to look at soccer and know what's not to do?

We get a lot of stick at the bottom of these pages for a perceived anti-South Africa stance, and while it's pretty obvious we are not exactly committee members of Bakkies Botha's fan club, we found it a tad unfair.

So in a spirit of giving credit where it's due we're going to actually praise something South African this week: Hugh Bladen and Joel Stransky.

It is so, so refreshing to listen to local commentators actually finding it within themselves to look at on-field incidents objectively, and to use their experience to enrich the viewer with nuances of insight that will cause informed debate rather than just national bandwagonning and antipathy.

Rewind a fortnight to the Boks' thumping in New Zealand and you had Mathew Pearce and Bob Skinstad actually bragging on air about how they were able to be one-eyed because they were broadcasting to a local audience, before launching yet another unsubstantiated tirade against the officiating. It was hideous.

As with every major broadcaster, there will be a commentary race in SA for which duo gets to call the big games. We desperately hope Supersport get it right and choose Blades and Joel. For if we have to put up with the other two commentating on SA games during this World Cup, that perceived anti-South African stance might even become a reality…

Harking back to the professionalism rant in the opening paragraph, there is another ill stalking the game at the moment: agents.

In the week when Jano Vermaak inexplicably left the table-topping Lions to join the struggling Blue Bulls for no perceptible reason other than a boatload more cash, Newcastle coach Alan Tait was left fuming by England youngster Alex Gray's switch to London Irish.

“We put in a lot of time and effort bringing the kids through and look for loyalty,” Tait told BBC Newcastle.

“But agents have bigger and better things for them, or so they tell them.”

Those agents are also the ones passing on all sorts of random players to random clubs, all of them making money, few of them earning it. The stories you hear… one club in South Africa recently recruited a prop, who arrived, bemoaned the lack of a television in his free accommodation and disappeared whence he came the same day.

Then there's the story of a schoolboy who had starred for his first team for a season and was being sniffed out by a club, but when approached by a club representative uttered: “you'll have to speak to my agent.”

Agents start the rot by placing players at clubs for the wrong reasons, but there are player problems too. As one agent recently put it: “they all want an arm and a leg, but most of them are players who don't make it in their own country so think they can make it abroad. They all want to be paid. It's tough to find players who play for fun any more.”

Yes it is.

World Cup notes from the weekend:

Australia: Surprisingly clinical, stubborn and resilient.
South Africa: Unskilled, unfit, lumbering.
Wales: See Australia.
England: See South Africa – although the English are fitter.
France: Brilliant for 20 minutes. Otherwise…
Ireland: The lack of back-up to the old guard is worrying.
Italy: As the attack improves, so the defence gets leaky.
Japan: Genuine evidence of a real threat if not carefully watched.
USA: Mentally fragile.
Canada: Mentally fragile, although marginally stronger than USA.

Loose pass compiled by Richard Anderson