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Stag Party

Southland rugby’s best memories are captured in grainy photos and dusty almanacks. The 1939 team which took the Ranfurly Shield into the Second World War and held it for a season and half afterwards, victory over the Lions in 1966 and the French in 1979.For a decade Southland rugby played second fiddle to a rampant Sting netball team. The past two seasons, however, have marked a new dawn for the province, a rugby renaissance which is seeing the fans come back to Rugby Park and the old maroon burning with a new enthusiasm, as NATHAN BURDON reports.

Tuesday, 03 November 2009

Nathan Burdon

THE STAGS charted new territory during last year’s national provincial championships when they made it to the semi-finals for the first time. After finishing sixth at the end of the round-robin stage, they travelled to Mt Maunganui for the quarter-final and over-ran an exhausted Bay of Plenty team 45-11 having lost at the same venue two weeks before.

During the following week’s semi-final Southland were in the hunt until late in the game against Wellington in the capital before losing 28-19.

The Stags had recorded their best ever season in the NPC, playing more with guts than glamour, and with a heavy reliance on the boot of Blair Stewart who was the competition’s leading points scorer.

In 2009 the Stags have delivered on the promise of last season. Early wins over Super 14 base teams Otago and Waikato saw Southland leap to the top of the standings and they spent most of the season in the top four.
Over the past two seasons, Clarke Dermody, Jimmy Cowan and Jamie Mackintosh have played for the All Blacks. Several others have played for Maori or Junior teams.

When Cowan made his All Black debut as a replacement against Italy in 2004, it had been nearly a decade since the last Southland-based player had pulled on the black jersey, when Simon Culhane and Paul Henderson played at the 1995 World Cup.

What’s led to the revival in Southland rugby? According to Rugby Southland chief executive Roger Clark, it certainly hasn’t been based on any complicated management models or flash marketing campaigns.

“It’s not rocket science,” he says. As Clark describes it, Southland rugby has always produced good - and sometimes great - players. The union’s biggest issue, however, has been retaining that talent.

“It’s a proven fact that top athletes usually come from smaller areas because they get more opportunities,” says Clark.

Whether that’s because there are more coaches who have more time to give because they don’t have to drive an hour each way to work, or something as simple as the abundance of space in a province like Southland, Clark isn’t sure.

“Traditionally Southland has produced outstanding athletes. We’ve had 50 odd All Blacks and Southland Boys’ High School has been one of the most successful schools in secondary schools rugby. Our job is really to enhance that and make sure we keep people here rather than the Jeff Wilsons and Paul Hendersons of this world buggering off and playing for other unions, and we’ve managed to do that.

“We knew that if we kept our best players here - and we’ve had about 182 kids that have been in New Zealand age group teams since they started selecting those teams - and get them through to the Stags then eventually the Stags would be pretty good, and that’s what we’ve done.”

Clark knows from painful experience what he’s talking about. One of his first jobs when he came into the role more than a decade ago following a restructuring of the Southland union was to try to get a promising young school kid by the name of Mils Muliaina back out of the clutches of Auckland.

He wasn’t successful, Muliaina has been. Though Samoan-born, Muliaina was essentially a home-grown product. His two brothers, Faolua and Alesana, have both gone onto play for the Stags, but there’s always been a feeling that Mils was the one that got away.

Pita Alatini, who had been pinched by Southland from Counties, was in turn enticed across the border by Otago and almost immediately became an All Black, just one of the incidents which have added to an intense, and at times bitter, relationship between the two Highlanders franchise partners.

The Muliaina case was a hard-learned lesson, but it was one which made people pay attention.

Corey Flynn, who shifted to Canterbury in 2002, has been the only other loss of a major home-grown player to another province since the turn of the century - although there was much disappointment when Ben Herring headed to Wellington the following year.

For several seasons, however, Southland did rely on an influx of imports who proved, by and large, to be less than spectacular.

Some, like Herring, locks Steve Jackson and Brendon Timmins, were a success but Southland rugby had to kiss a lot of frogs to find the odd prince.

Ultimately, the policy of developing your own players and then doing whatever it takes to hold onto them has been successful.

What has proved invaluable in doing that is the support of the Invercargill Licensing Trust.

Licensing trusts are a quirk of history, introduced in some areas following the end of prohibition. Walk into most of the bars in Invercargill and at least part of the money from the beer in your hand will go back into the community.
It’s the reason a small city with a population which hovers around 50,000 can boast world-class sporting facilities including the Splash Palace swimming complex, New Zealand’s only indoor velodrome and Stadium Southland.
While there is significant funding from the likes of the Community Trust of Southland, it’s a simple equation - if there was no ILT there would be no first division rugby team.

To be fair, the union faces the same issues at grassroots level as any other smaller province.

The decline in numbers in rural areas is a big problem for a whole lot of small country clubs who have struggled to hold onto their identity.
Amalgamation has become commonplace, but it hasn’t solved the problem.
In northern Southland, the combined Balfour-Lumsden team fell over this season and there is little confidence that it will return next year.

The boom in the dairy industry has done wonders for the Southland economy but it hasn’t been as positive for rugby. Lean operations and long work hours, combined with the increasing number of activities available to young people has meant competition for leisure time.

While numbers have increased - there were 20 more teams playing in Rugby Southland competitions this year - clubs find it increasingly difficult to get players to games on Saturday, let alone to week-night training.

There are only seven teams in the premier division of club rugby. Four of them are based in Invercargill, with a fifth, Woodlands, which draws most of its players from town, only 15 minutes away.

A rural club, excluding Woodlands, has not won the province’s top club trophy, the Galbraith Shield, since a young Paul Miller led Waikaka to the title in 1998.

Since Waikaka dropped out of the top flight, there have been serious efforts made at getting the Gore-based Excelsior club to a competitive level but they struggled in premier division this season.

Winton-based Midlands, 25 minutes north of Invercargill, offered some hope this year when they got through to the final before losing to Star. Club rugby continues to be the same vexed issue for Rugby Southland that it is in other provinces.

In recent seasons representative players have been pulled from their clubs before the season finale but pressure from the clubs saw the Galbraith Shield final played during the early part of Southland’s pre-season build-up to avoid major disruption to club or province.

The reality is Southland rugby can’t afford any scrapping between its various interests.

With a population of 90,000 from the last census it is considerably smaller than even the next smallest province of Taranaki (100,000), and positively dwarfed by the likes of Tasman (130,000).

It’s those numbers which put Southland on the back foot under the New Zealand Rugby Union’s criteria for inclusion in the next version of the NPC.
But according to Clark, size does not really matter.

“I think the key thing is that size is not what it’s about, the key thing is the people that you’ve got involved in your organisation. We are just lucky that one, we’ve got good funding, and you’ve got to have that, and we’ve got good people.

“While we don’t get as much funding as some [unions], it doesn’t matter - if you get enough funding to do the job and you’ve got good people, that’s what makes the difference.

“We are lucky that right through from our board with guys like Graham Cooney and Leicester Rutledge and Simon [Culhane] and David [Henderson] and (Craig Morton) looking after the rugby and (Peter Skelt) looking after the academy. We’ve got good people all through our organisation in key roles. That’s what makes the difference really.

“Most of them are rated right up there as being amongst the best in their positions in the country. When you’ve got a whole group of them it helps you overcome the lack of numbers you’ve got.

“The key thing for us is that as a province, per head of population, we have more players and more spectators than anywhere else in New Zealand. Twenty per cent of our population have been coming to games, we’ve got the highest number of participants per head of population.”

Rutledge, a former Southland All Black, coached the Stags before leaving for Italy to be John Kirwan’s assistant with the national team.

He returned in a managerial role with Rugby Southland, which includes managing the Stags.

Former All Black Culhane and his club and provincial team-mate Henderson have provided solidity in the coaching department after a period of time which saw the sudden departures of Bob Telfer, Rutledge and Phil Young after short coaching stints.

Over the past five years, the duo has turned their slightly unusual co-coaching role into a success.

They’ve been aided by having a generation of considerable talent available to them to work with.

Dermody (now playing for London Irish), Cowan, Hoani MacDonald (Gwent Dragons), Jason Rutledge, David Hall, Josh Bekhuis and Jamie Mackintosh have formed the backbone of a competitive forward pack.

Now a crop of youngsters including first five-eighth Robbie Robinson, flanker John Hardie, lock Alex Ryan and hooker Brayden Mitchell are arriving on the scene.

With the exception of Ryan, who has transferred from Canterbury, the players are all products of Southland Boys’ and the Rugby Southland academy overseen by Skelt.

Robinson, Ryan and Mitchell were all members of this year’s New Zealand Under 20 team.

Combined with that is the influence of players who have arrived in the province and stayed. One season wonders who fail to impress have become increasingly rare at Rugby Southland.

Players like Tim Boys, Chris King, Scott Cowan, Jason Kawau, Kendrick Lynn, Matt Saunders and now Glen Horton have found success in Southland after not being able to make the grade in Otago.

Henderson and Culhane have put together a culture which players want to be a part of.

Culhane, who played more than 100 games for Southland and is the province’s record points scorer, says a major part of the Stags environment is about instilling pride in the jersey.

“I don’t think there’s anything magic about that. The players, hopefully they’ve all got a pride within themselves that they all want to pull on that jersey and be in the starting lineup every occasion they can.

“I guess competition in the squad is healthy. I don’t think it’s anything we’ve tried to create, it’s a by-product of what the whole squad’s about.”
Culhane and Henderson began coaching together at club level and then graduated to the Southland development team. They took over when Young departed for Otago in 2004.

There’s a strong feeling of unity about the squad, with several squad members having a common interest in hunting.

There’s an old school feel about the pair’s coaching, but Culhane said that did not mean ignoring what the players were saying.

“They are playing the game and you would be foolish not to listen to their views. At the end of the day we have to make the final decision but we have to listen to what the players have to say and value their opinions.”
Clark said the union worked hard to create a family atmosphere, not just in the team, but throughout the organisation.

“To me, if you create a family environment where you’ve got strong values and mutual respect for each other, but a whole lot of compassion as well, then you’ve got a winning environment.”

 

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