Did Richie McCaw Destroy International Rugby?

The Sydney Bledisloe Cup match of 2000 was a high water mark in international rugby. In front of 109,000 people, the world champion Australia team and the desperate, wounded All Blacks fought to the death like Ali and Frazier. Many who saw it said at the time it was the most extraordinary rugby match ever played, with an iconic match-winning performance from none other than Jonah Lomu.

The All Blacks prevailed on that night, 39-35, but the Wallabies would win by one point three weeks later to retain the Bledisloe Cup, and at the time it seemed like the advent of professional rugby was about to make for a titanic era of contests for this trophy.

Professional rugby seemed like it was going to bring a lot of razzamatazz to the Southern Hemisphere circuit – Super Rugby was also huge that year. The ACT Brumbies topped the table at the end of the pool stages, and ended up losing the final at home against the Canterbury Crusaders by one point.

The next year, 2001, marked the Super Rugby debut, also for the Crusaders, of one Richie Hugh McCaw. As it turned out, McCaw was not so much a rugby player as a genius that played rugby.

He only played eight minutes of Super Rugby that year, but he did play a full NPC season, and was good enough to win selection to the All Blacks’ end of year tour, where he was handed a debut against Ireland, and promptly won Man of the Match.

The next year, 2002, McCaw became a Crusaders regular. In an odd echo of the future, the Crusaders won every single match that year, taking the Super Rugby title undefeated – something never achieved before or since.

2003 might have been the end of the golden summer for Australian rugby. They lost the Bledisloe Cup, but managed to knock the All Blacks out of the World Cup, going on to take an all-conquering England team to extra time in the final.

Come 2017, and Australia has not won the Bledisloe Cup since. Richie McCaw may have retired two years ago, but in the same way that Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca depressed the price of gold in the Middle East for decades afterwards, McCaw’s decade of almost total dominance still depresses Australian rugby.

This year’s Super Rugby table makes for confusing reading. The current leaders of the Australian conference, the Brumbies, have fewer tournament points than the current wooden spooners of the New Zealand conference, the Blues.

New Zealand rugby is so dominant that the 4th-ranked Kiwi team, the Highlanders, has only lost three games all season. Despite this, they can’t climb any higher than 4th because the Hurricanes have only lost two, the Chiefs one and the Crusaders zero.

Even worse is the effect this dominance has had on the Internet rhetoric. At the turn of the century, trans-Tasman rugby banter was between equals. In recent years, however, it has taken a darker turn: the prison rape metaphor, once only applied to descriptions of All Blacks matches against the hapless Celts, crept into summaries of Bledisloe matches.

At its nadir, the Internet rhetoric was entirely based on the degree of sexual impotence the Australian players and fans would suffer as a consequence of the losses and for how many years afterwards. The jokes were that the children of Australian players would be too ashamed to admit their paternity to their classmates.

So the question is this: was Richie McCaw so good at rugby that he actually destroyed the international game? Did he set standards so high that all other nations just gave up on hoping to ever match them?

Probably not. After all, Australia made it to the World Cup final in 2015, and they did about as well there as any other side could have hoped to have done – namely, a loss by a two-try margin.

Alexander the Great died at age 33, and within months of the same age Richie McCaw retired from international rugby. The struggle for a successor to Alexander saw his empire shatter into four pieces and then to further disintegrate.

Kieran Read now leads the All Blacks, and his side might play the role of the Seleucid Empire, the early favourites to recreate the total world domination that McCaw once achieved.

However, no order can exist indefinitely, and it is in the nature of peaks to erode into valleys. The standards set by McCaw are unlikely to be maintained for the simple reason that the men tasked with doing so will not possess McCaw’s genius.

This column believes that it is in the Australian nature, despite a decade of denial, to recognise the smell of blood at the first opportunity and to take advantage of it. Therefore, it predicts that the current sorry state of Australian rugby will not last for much longer.

And as long as one side can stand up to the All Blacks the others will always believe themselves to have a hope.

Poetry K-Hole 1: Down And Out in Nelson and Stoke

Down And Out in Nelson and Stoke

Hermes Trismestigus,

On the fuckin’ benefit.

His case manager Te Aroha gives him arseholes.

A right fuckin’ rark up.

Doesn’t want to thin apples,

Doesn’t want to fillet Hoki.

Just wants to write about the psychic elements

And the topography of impinging dimensions

Not much good being a smart cunt if he’s sitting at home on the dole

Not working for his money.

Te Aroha’s had a bloody gutsful

And so has Raelene

No more going to the drags,

No more car shows at Rangoon,

No more midget stock car racing

Til he gets his fuckin’ act together.

He thinks he a smart cunt,

Says he can invert mental polarities

And formulate a geometric model for translating

The operations of higher dimensions into the lower,

But he can’t even remember his 9-digit client number

Or where he last saw his community services card.

Te Aroha has just about lost all hope,

Raelene is sick of Hell’s Angels knocking on the door

Looking for Hermes after selling them a bad batch.

Maybe what he needs is to sort his shit out,

Go on an Outward Bound course,

Might get his foot in the door with the army,

Maybe even an apprenticeship.

Maybe he could do his fork-lift licence,

Or maybe go back and finish his School Certificate,

Instead of poring through the Necronomicon

Or scrying alien constellations.

*

Simon P. Murphy is the author of His Master’s Wretched Organ.

Understanding New Zealand: Internet MANA voters

As the Maori Party split away from Labour, so did the MANA Party split away from the Maori Party, and then it joined up with Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party to become the Internet MANA chimera. But who did Hone Harawira’s machine end up appealing to?

Like the Maori Party, Internet MANA appealed to Maoris. The correlations between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and with both voting Maori Party in 2014 and being Maori were 0.84.

Correspondingly, there are strong correlations between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and voting for all of the Maori-heavy parties in 2014. Between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2014 the correlation was 0.76; with voting New Zealand First in 2014 it was 0.44; and with voting Labour in 2014 it was 0.41.

Curiously, Internet MANA voters were exactly as unlikely to have sympathies for National or Conservative as Maori Party voters. As with the Maori Party, the correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and voting National in 2014 was -0.75, and the correlation with voting Conservative in 2014 was -0.64.

Perhaps the major demographic difference between Maori Party voters and Internet MANA ones is that the latter were slightly less Maori and slightly more Pacific Islander and Asian. The correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and being a Pacific Islander was 0.07, and with being Asian it was -0.23 (compared to 0.01 and -0.30 for the correlations between these two groups and voting Maori Party).

In fact, the general demographic trend is that Internet MANA voters, despite being generally disenfranchised, are doing slightly better than Maori Party voters. Correspondingly, the correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and turnout rate in 2014 was, at -0.69, slightly weaker than for the Maori Party (-0.74).

Although most of the demographic distinctions are subtle, one of the clearest is when it comes to education. The correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and having no qualifications was 0.42, which was weaker than the equivalent for the Maori Party. Also, unlike with voting for the Maori Party in 2014, voting for Internet MANA in 2014 had no significant negative correlation with holding either of the two highest academic qualifications.

Further underlining the minor class differences, Internet MANA voters were marginally less likely to be on the unemployment or invalid’s benefits, and marginally more likely to be on the student allowance. Also, they were much less likely to work in manufacturing and slightly less likely to be regular tobacco smokers than Maori Party voters.

They were, however, essentially the same age. The correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and median age was -0.65, making them the smallest smidgen older than Maori Party voters. This underlines the degree to which Internet MANA differentiates itself from the Maori Party primarily through subtle class differences and not age.

Curiously, Internet MANA voters were more likely to be self-employed than Maori Party voters, but were less likely to be self-employed with employees. This might reflect the degree to which Internet MANA voters, or at least a significant cadre of them, are more likely to be immigrants and therefore less likely to be established than Maoris.

It may be that, in so far as Internet MANA appeals to a newer sort of New Zealander, it also appeals to a sort of person who does not have the intergenerational poverty and trauma that many Maoris suffer from. This may explain the small differences in wealth, health and educational outcomes.

*

This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

The Great Division at the Heart of Generation X

The 1999 film Fight Club was highly prophetic for those too young to identify with the Baby Boomers and too old to identify with the Millennials: those of us who vaguely, apathetically, identify with being called Generation X. Speaking to us in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, Tyler Durden told us what we already suspected, but dreaded being forced to accept: we are the middle children of history, no purpose, no place.

It’s true. We stand for nothing. Nothing unites us, apart from this cynicism. We have no Great War – Afghanistan and Iraq will never define our generation like Vietnam did the one before us and World War II the one before that. Very few of us fought in it, and the body count incurred simply does not compare.

Neither do we have a Great Depression.

The proportion of Baby Boomers raised in absolute poverty dwarfs the proportion of Generation X raised in absolute poverty, as the several decades of technological advancements and massive industrial and economic expansion after World War II all but eliminated childhood poverty by the 1970s, save for the unfortunates born to mentally or physically ill parents.

Where the Baby Boomers used the political system as a weapon to enslave the coming generations and to keep them working to maintain Boomer leisure and privilege, Generation X mostly refused to engage.

And where the Millennials are taking measures to overthrow the current political and economic systems and to replace them something not borne of the poverty mentality of the Boomers, again Generation X mostly refuses to engage.

In this sense, Generation X is a generation of springtime, in that we comprise the part of the sine wave where yin transforms to yang, and life begins to blossom but without direction, owing to its inexperience.

But in the same way that the springtime is a season of broken weather, so too is Generation X naturally unstable, and so too will we break apart.

But can we really like ourselves without knowing who we are, and doesn’t that require a purpose and a place?

The natural division at our heart is like this: half of us are like the Boomers, half are like the Millennials.

It might be that the Boomers end up representing the “old left” in the exact same way that they once represented the “new left” against the “old right” of the Greatest Generation, with the Silent Generation playing the role of autumn.

This suggests that half of Generation X will sell out and throw their lot in with their parents, resisting change and acting to perpetuate the same injustices on the Millennials that the Boomers imposed on them.

In this way, half of us will become the “old left”. Probably this means that, as we age and become the leaders of industry alongside the Boomers, we will advocate for more governmental control and regulation, fewer entrepreneurial freedoms and the continued importation of millions of third-world people to destroy the solidarity and so also the wages of those we employ, screaming “racism” every time a Millennial or Generation Z complains about anything.

The other half of us will become the “new right”. Probably this means that, as the Millennials also age and gain in economic and political influence, they will still look primarily to members of Generation X for immediate guidance, and those of us willing and able to fill these roles will naturally do so.

It’s very possible both that the Millennials and Generation Z, having been raised in an abundance mentality that sharply contrasts with the poverty mentality of the Boomers and their immediate predecessors, will demand a radical transformation of society and revaluation of values, and that they will look to members of Generation X for moral, philosophical and spiritual guidance.

This column predicts that half of us will succeed in reciprocating these expectations from the next generations, whereas the other half will cling to the old ways out of fear and fail.

The next generations might well be horrified at the sexual permissiveness, the suicidally reckless obsession with alcohol, the negligent attitude to the potential negative consequences of mass immigration, the indifference to the mental damage of exposure to suggestive television advertising and the brutally cognitively restrictive education system that all combine to characterise the culture that we have become used to – after all, none of these phenomena are caused by the expression of universal or eternal moral truths.

Will we stand aside for the next generation, or will we try and strangle it in the crib in order to shore up our own positions? That is the essential question that will divide Generation X over the coming decades.