All Blacks shouldn't make a song and dance about Haka
All Blacks shouldn't make a song and dance about Haka
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Richie McCaw leads the All Blacks as they perform the Haka before the Bledisloe Cup match between New Zealand and Australia at Hong Kong Stadium. Source: Getty Images
IT WAS once a theatrical affair, loved by children and armchair fans, but the ridiculous bout of pre-game posturing has no place in rugby today.
But the Haka has changed, profoundly. The All Blacks and their followers have made it a self-important bore and instrument of the worst kind of sporting arrogance. How many Maoris believe that their tradition has been hijacked? And symbolically, it sometimes stops just short of an exhortation to murder. In one of its versions, it ends with the players making graphic throat-cutting gestures.
Opposition is growing. One recent critic of the Haka refers to a "politically correct lunacy" and a "cynical stage-managed circus". Another calls the Haka "a bad joke" and another said the team performing it are like "preening ninnies".
And all this came before a crass intervention by the International Rugby Board. During the recent women's Rugby World Cup, the Australian team advanced on the Haka by a few half-hearted steps. After the match the IRB fined them $2,000.
Why? Apparently, there are IRB protocols (never publicly announced) which say the side facing the Haka must stand like lemons a minimum of 10 metres away and not advance.
It does not actually state that they should lie down and allow the Blacks to walk all over them, but that is the spirit of the measure. After the fining incident, we heard from Mike Miller, chief executive of the IRB.
"It is a traditional part of the game," he said. "If people want to develop something - not a response, not a war dance, but a traditional or cultural way of engendering that team spirit for a match, great. They should be able to and we should create the space to do it. It would be a shame if people said, 'Let's do away with it', or felt the need to do some response that took away from the dignity and power of it."
Whatever Miller is on about and whatever toadying we must expect towards New Zealand as their World Cup approaches, there were two aspects of the whole sorry mess that he got completely wrong.
First, the Haka in most forms is a call to war. If Miller doesn't want the reaction, then he must ban the challenge. Secondly there has been no dignity whatsoever surrounding the performance of the Haka for many years.
Perhaps the All Blacks were at their most ludicrous at the Millennium stadium in 2006. By then, everybody realised the Haka was being performed not just for culture, but as an attempt to establish the kind of early psychological blow for which coaches are desperate.
Courageously the Welsh Rugby Union stood their ground. They did not ban the Haka, just announced it would precede the Welsh national anthem - in 99 per cent of Tests the home anthem is the final ceremonial act before kick-off.
New Zealand sulked to high heaven. They refused to do the Haka on the field. Instead, they let an unofficial crew come into their dressing room and, eventually, put out a film of them performing the Haka in the dressing room.
Afterwards, they bleated at this gross act of national insult - no mention of any insult to Wales and to their hosts' anthem. And although the Kiwis tried to dictate the whole Haka process with a barrage of unwritten rules, the rules are always conveniently changing.
For example, one day they are happy when teams advance on them. Another day, they rage that this is disrespectful. In 1989 in Dublin, the Irish linked arms and advanced almost into the middle of the Haka. But Mike Brewer, the New Zealand forward, was one of several players who admitted that all that Ireland had done was accept the challenge.
But when England menaced the Haka before the Test at Old Trafford in 1997, when England's Richard Cockerill and New Zealand's Norm Hewitt all but came to blows, the affronted New Zealand camp complained bitterly.
In 2008, two years after the WRU had had the temerity to ask that their own anthem in their own stadium should take priority, the Welsh team took another approach. After the Haka they stood motionless and stared back. Again, New Zealanders complained - clearly prepared to dish out the call out to sporting war but not prepared to accept it when the call was taken up.
In 2005 the Lions consulted the ubiquitous, even capricious, Maori elders. They were told it would be appropriate for skipper Brian O'Driscoll to accept the challenge by throwing some grass into the air. And what happened? A few minutes after his gesture, O'Driscoll was smashed in an illegal double tackle and was out of the tour.
The IRB is supposed to represent the interests of all of rugby. To fine a group of Australian girls for wandering towards a Haka when it's used simply to bully is disgraceful. As Phil Kearns, the great Australian hooker, said: "The IRB should butt out."
There are a whole raft of Hakas. The elders have a fund of them. Sometimes, we are even treated to teasing media releases, as if we are all agog as to which version the All Blacks will actually use before the game.
When will New Zealand realise that nobody cares anymore? And that it is their fault for betraying their own ideal of the game.
The Sunday Times
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