In a dramatic twist, current vice-chairman, former Scotland flanker John Jeffrey, has pulled out of the race to succeed Bill Beaumont after his own union withdrew their support for him.
With Jeffrey out, former Australian flanker Brent Robinson is now favourite to win the November vote and become the most powerful figure in the global game.
New Zealand Rugby (NZR) will see Robinson’s elevation to the top job – should it come – as a massive win for the game here, believing it will lead to more dynamic decision-making, and critically, that it will give international rugby a fan-centric champion – someone who will support initiatives to ensure test matches are consistently refereed and with a brief to speed them up.
Robinson, when he spoke to the Herald last month, said that should he get the job, he would use his influence to steer both the laws and their application towards enabling skill execution and athleticism to have a better platform to flourish.
“We have introduced all these other mechanisms to speed things up and what we are trying to do is introduce fatigue to move us a bit further to the middle away from the anaerobic nature of the athlete,” he said.
“We have become a power-based, short-spurt, large-body game and there is a desire for us to move back to the centre where endurance, agility, fatigue frees up a game.”
This, of course, is precisely the messaging New Zealand wants to hear in its quest to both leapfrog the All Blacks back to the top of the world rankings and to rekindle wider interest in the sport.
For the last decade, both NZR and the All Blacks have felt that international rugby has been refereed to favour teams who choose not to play with the ball and that the stop-start nature and prolonged stoppages have encouraged teams to build oversized, anaerobic athletes.
There is validity to their argument – it’s not a mad conspiracy theory or an irrational attempt to justify the All Blacks’ relative lack of success at the last two World Cups.
But what they may be overestimating is the ability of one man to deliver institutional change and influence attitudes of those who sit around the World Rugby decision-making table.
New Zealand’s ambition to reinvent the game as one more likely to suit their hybrid athletes and an audience in search of thrills and spills, is not universally shared.
Robinson may well have fresh ideas and every intention to shake things up should he take office, but he may find he’s hitting his head against a brick wall in trying to persuade some of his peers to see the game through a similar lens.
And there is no more powerful example of how wildly out of synch rugby’s key decision-makers are than the mad way the 2023 World Cup final was officiated and the lack of reprisals that followed.
Having lost the final, New Zealand is effectively muzzled from complaining too much about the decisions that were made that night for fear of being seen to blame the defeat on the officials.
But New Zealand’s silence doesn’t mean there weren’t incredible inconsistencies and unexplained mistakes – the failure to review Eben Etzebeth’s forearm to Sam Cane’s head but a yellow for Shannon Frizell after he was spotted infringing at a ruck; the red card to Cane and yellow to South African captain Siya Kolisi for what looked like an identical offence; and the wrongful decision to deny Aaron Smith a try for a knock-on that was committed too many phases previously.
All of this has been swept under the carpet by World Rugby, because the final was deemed to have produced brilliant entertainment, going down to the last minute with the two teams separated by just one point.
The All Blacks were the victims of some rank injustices and glaring errors and yet no one has taken any accountability or admitted it was mad to let the TMO be so intrusive on the night; and madder still to have played the showpiece event without a 20-minute red-card rule to have lessened the impact of the entirely subjective rulings that Cane’s offence was somehow worse than the one committed by Kolisi.
And this is the challenge for Robinson, should he become chairman – can he persuade those around him that the World Cup final was not the roaring success they claim, but was in fact a horror show that left New Zealanders nursing a rank sense of injustice and neutral followers with deep confusion about what on earth was going on?
