French rugby team turns nose up at Hamilton ahead of test
Photo:
RNZ / Libby Kirkby-McLeod
The French rugby team have caused a stir with their decision to go to Auckland after this weekend's test match, staying there before the series finale against the All Blacks in Hamilton on 19 July.
Chatting at his store near Garden Place in Hamilton, Hanrad Bespoke Rugs owner Barry Radford said it was disappointing the French team was choosing Auckland over Hamilton.
"They've got a sell-out stadium. It would be good if they kind of supported that," he said.
However, a rug shopper wondered what Hamilton had to offer.
"Is there anything exciting for them to do here? I guess in Auckland they've got lots to do... without being disrespectful to Hamilton," she said.
Les Bleus said they are staying in Auckland simply because there they have access to high performance facilities and larger hotels.
Yet Hamilton and Waikato Tourism general manager, Nicola Greenwell, said Waikato was the home of lots of high-performance sport.
"We've got the velodrome just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the airport from Hamilton city, the rowing at Karapiro, there's a lot of high-performance sportspeople who are based here."
For rugby, she considered the facilities at the Chiefs centre to be first class.
"Maybe we didn't want to share that?" she wondered.
Harmony Jade from Beast Style Fitness in Hamilton says the city is full of athletes.
Photo:
Natalie Akoorie
Harmony Jade from Beast Style Fitness also thought Hamilton was a great place for athletes.
"We are very athletic people. I know that there are so many athletes here in Hamilton," she said.
She wondered if the French team even knew much about Hamilton.
"I don't think they even know who we are... they shouldn't judge before they get to know who we are."
Greenwell said there was plenty of visitor beds in Hamilton for the team but conceded if the whole touring party wanted to stay in one hotel that would limit their options.
But she said Hamilton was working on that.
"We do have new hotels coming - the Pullman will be opening at the end of next year and that will absolutely be ample room for those French rugby players."
Hamilton Business Association chief executive Vanessa Williams said the new Pullman hotel development was exciting for the city and would add to what Hamilton could already offer.
"It's going to be very exciting to host bigger and better things," she said.
Williams said it was always disappointing to hear about travellers who only go to one place and explore one thing.
"I think it's a great opportunity to actually come down and enjoy something different."
Hamilton Business Association general manager Vanessa Williams says a new hotel in the city next year will boost bed capacity.
Photo:
Libby Kirkby-McLeod / RNZ
She said there was lots to enjoy in and around Hamilton as a visitor to New Zealand.
"But you need to be down here to enjoy them."
Hamilton also had a touch of French culture which the French team could have enjoyed.
Bordeaux-born Samantha Wiria from Le Rendez-vous Creperie said she had been really looking forward to welcoming the French team to town and having them come in and sample some of their crepes.
"We were hopeful that we would see them walking around in the CBD," she said.
Despite her disappointment she said she'll still be at the game cheering for the French side.
"As much as we are always behind the All Blacks in any game they have, when they play the French we put on the blue, white, red, and support the team."
And it's out on the field where locals think the issue will truly be settled.
"The team are the losers at the end of the day, and maybe that might be what sets the tone for the game," Greenwell said.
Hamilton mayor Paula Southgate said the sweet victory for the city would be when the All Blacks beat the French in Hamilton in the test series finale.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero
,
a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RNZ News
3 hours ago
- RNZ News
Black Caps crush Zimbabwe by nine wickets in first test
New Zealand's Matt Henry celebrates a wicket, Basin Reserve, 2024. Photo: PHOTOSPORT New Zealand won the first test against Zimbabwe inside three days, securing victory at the Queens Sports Club in Bulawayo by nine wickets after skittling out the hosts a second time. Stand-in skipper Mitchell Santner took four wickets as Zimbabwe were dismissed for 165 runs in their second innings after being 31-2 overnight, leaving New Zealand needing only eight runs in their second innings to win the test. They achieved the target in 14 balls but not before opener Devon Conway was bowled in the first over by Newman Nyamburi for four. Henry Nicholls hit the winning run in the third over after tea on the third day to see the tourists go 1-0 up in the two-test series. Zimbabwe started the day with hopes of wiping out a 158-run first innings deficit and setting a tough target for New Zealand to chase but they were always up against it, even if the tourists were two bowlers short. All-rounder Nathan Smith suffered an abdominal strain on the second day and then Will O'Rourke did not bowl after lunch on Friday because of stiffness in his back. Zimbabwe added only three runs to their overnight score before Nick Welch was caught behind off O'Rourke and by lunch Zimbabwe were tottering on 114-6, still 44 runs adrift. They had by then lost leading scorer Sean Williams, who tickled the ball down leg to be caught behind for 49, and captain Craig Ervine, who got a feint edge to Matt Henry and was out for 22. Henry, who took 6-39 in the first innings, persisted as the lone pace man after lunch and dismissed Zimbabwe's last recognised batsman Sikandar Raza cheaply to ensure a nine-wicket match haul. Photo: PHOTOSPORT Santner, captaining the Kiwis for the first time in the absence of the injured Tom Latham, mopped up the tail as he took the last three wickets for figures of 4-27 off 17.1 overs. Henry took 3-51 in the second innings and O'Rourke 3-28 off 10 overs before his injury. Zimbabwe won the toss on the first day on Wednesday and, after electing to bat, scored 149 with New Zealand getting 307-9 in reply in their first innings. The second test will also be played in Bulawayo, starting next Thursday. - Reuters
RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
The battle to get netball on TV: How did it come to this?
The Tactix celebrate winning the 2025 ANZ Premiership. Photo: Andrew Cornaga/ Analysis - How has New Zealand's top netball competition gone from attracting millions in broadcast rights, to having to fork out some of its own money to get it on TV? Just six years ago the Silver Ferns were on top of the world after beating Australia in the final to win the 2019 Netball World Cup. Fast-forward, and the national body finally secured a broadcast deal this week for next year's ANZ Premiership, following months of drawn-out negotiations. Sky Sport had been the major broadcast partner since 2008, but the national body is going back to TVNZ - marking the return of the sport on free-to-air television. RNZ understands that Sky TVs offer was so much lower than any of its previous deals, that Netball New Zealand didn't actually have too much to lose in rolling the dice. The new broadcast deal does not include rights for Silver Ferns matches - Netball New Zealand is still looking for a home for Test netball from 2026. How much TVNZ are actually paying for the rights, if any, won't be disclosed but it seems inevitable that players will face pay cuts. Netball NZ is taking a calculated risk that a bigger TV audience will draw more commercial revenue to make up for a massive shortfall in broadcast revenue. The one-year agreement also buys Netball New Zealand some time if it wants to explore joining the Australian league from 2027 in some capacity. It feels like netball is back where it was in 2007 before the dawn of the semi-professional trans-Tasman competition, which promised so much. But at least then the country's best players were still playing in New Zealand. Next year, nearly half the Silver Ferns could be playing in Australia. Netball World Cup 2019 winners. Photo: © (t/a Photography Hub Ltd) Netball New Zealand's stocks were high following the Silver Ferns' victory at the 2019 World Cup. When Spark emerged as a player in the sports broadcast market in 2019, Sky quickly locked down the netball rights until the end of 2024, despite having two years to run on the existing deal. In 2023 Spark Sport came to an end and Sky has had no real competition since. Tougher economic times means a lot of sports are now looking over their shoulder. Talks over a new broadcast deal between New Zealand Rugby and Sky have dragged on for months. Sky Television's profits have taken a hit , and they are tightening their belts. Sky Sport's 2025 ANZ Premiership broadcast looked a little different to previous years. The weekly Netball Zone programme was dropped, one on-site host fronted regular season games instead of two, and remote commentary was used for four of the matches. White Fern Amelia Kerr is now one of the most recognised sports personalities in NZ. Photo: Photosport Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of women's sport globally and it's not really netball's fault that this has happened - it was always going to. As traditionally male dominated sports have invested more in their women's programmes, it's helped increase the profile of codes like of women's cricket and rugby. Netball used to be essential in Sky Sports' line-up because it was the only female sport it would broadcast on a regular basis. Women's rugby gets far more coverage on Sky than it used to, including Super Rugby Aupiki, the Farah Palmer Cup, the Black Ferns, and sevens. The same goes for women's cricket and next year will see the return to Sky of the White Ferns playing domestically. Sky also broadcasts the New Zealand women's basketball league, rugby league's NRLW, and football's A-League women's competition. And if Sky want the rights to All Blacks and Black Caps matches, New Zealand Rugby and New Zealand Cricket can leverage that to get better coverage for their women. Sky TV's Anna Stanley and Anna Harrison. Photo: PHOTOSPORT When Australian Diamonds sides used to tour New Zealand, they would be jealous of the level of media coverage the Silver Ferns got. But former Diamonds coach Lisa Alexander told RNZ earlier this year that she had noticed a shift. "There was so much more coverage in New Zealand [back then] and I think you've taken it for granted to be quite honest because it's really hard to get it back," Alexander said. "In Australia we are fighting very very hard to have our slice of the media pie and it's still very tough …but I'm now a columnist, I write about netball - I wouldn't have dreamed of that 10 years ago." It probably took Netball NZ too long to recognise that with more female sports vying for eyeballs, it had to actively generate more intrigue in its showpiece competition. A concerted effort to attract top-tier quality import players to the ANZ Premiership from the start would have helped it compete with the Australian league. But a one import player per team limit and a lack of ambition in targeting a pool of top talent, meant that ship sailed a long time ago. NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark and players at the launch of the ground-breaking ANZ Championship, March 2008. Photo: James Ensing-Trussell Oh how the tables have turned. Between 2008 and 2016, revenue generated from New Zealand propped up the former trans-Tasman ANZ Championship. Broadcast revenue from Sky was divvied up equally among the franchises on both sides of the Tasman to cover the salary cap. But after banking more than $10 million from Sky for eight years, eventually Australia didn't need New Zealand anymore. Netball Australia finally started carrying some clout with their broadcasters and secured a paid broadcast deal for the first time. Australia's Suncorp Super Netball (SSN) competition struggles to break even, but crowds and viewership have been growing and the SSN pays the highest salaries of any league. England Netball launched a new-look Netball Super League (NSL) this year, marking a significant step towards professionalism. For the first time all games were available to watch, and the average salary increased by at least 60 percent. New Zealand was a couple of decades ahead of the curve when TVNZ started broadcasting netball regularly from the 1980's. It's only been in the last few years that other countries finally figured out that broadcasting women's sport is actually pretty cool. Any novelty factor has long gone in New Zealand, but England Netball and Netball Australia are riding that wave of momentum - and they operate in bigger economies. Kelly Jackson Photo: PHOTOSPORT It would be easy to conclude that the quality of the ANZ Premiership must be declining, that less people are playing netball, and viewership is dwindling - but that's not the case. Netball NZ said this year's domestic competition saw record-breaking crowds. Its 2024 annual report described last year's ANZ Premiership as the most popular season yet and that viewership was up over 1.7 million viewers - "another large increase year-on-year for the competition." It reported a 50 percent increase in ANZ Premiership viewership and over 35 percent increase in Constellation Cup audience in New Zealand. Silver Fern defender Kelly Jackson said the country's top netballers were still among the best in the world. "I think the hardest part of all to accept in these troubling times is that the product we are putting out on court is still to a really high standard and that's not being reflected in what's going on," Jackson said. The Silver Ferns beat Australia 3-1 in the Constellation Cup last year, suggesting the ANZ Premiership can't be too bad. Players' Association boss Steph Bond said participation rates were still miles ahead of other female sports. "The community game is still growing … there is definitely the fans and the people that are supporting the game just at this point in time we don't seem to be able to be getting that turned into dollars and making that a difference at that level," Bond said. The National Bank Cup final in Invercargill, 2005. The Southern Sting had a huge fanbase. Photo: Richard Jones Netball New Zealand's move to free-to-air might see some short-term pain for long-term gain. No longer will people miss out on watching the domestic competition because they can't afford a Sky subscription. In the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s most budding young netballers would have been able to name every member of the Silver Ferns and that helped netball hold its own against male codes. In 2024, Netball NZ trialled free-to-air coverage of the ANZ Premiership, and this year Saturday games were screened exclusively on TVNZ. If fans are the bedrock of professional sport then opening up the sport to more of them could ultimately pay off for Netball New Zealand. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Otago Daily Times
5 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Argentine rugby's Queenstown link
Pumas assistant coach Kenny Lynn returns to Argentina next month where they'll play back-to-back Tests against the All Blacks. PHOTO: JAMES ALLAN PHOTOGRAPHY You appreciate how global international rugby's become when one of Argentina's assistant coaches lives in Queenstown. Former Southland Stag and Highlander utility back Kenny Lynn, 42, and his family shifted to Arrow Junction six months ago, after initially moving to Dunedin from France last year. He'd originally moved to France to play for Lyon in 2014 when it was still in the second division. Battling injury in his second year, he joined Lyon's coaching team and eventually became head coach of what's now an established Top 14 side. Last year he joined the Dunedin-based Highlanders as their attack coach, but, only one year into a three-year contract, accepted Pumas coach Felipe Contepomi's out-of-the-blue offer to join his coaching team. "When he first put it to me I obviously thought, 'well, we can't', because we'd just moved from France to New Zealand, we didn't want to move the kids all the way over to Argentina. "But when he said, 'no, it's fine, you can do it from NZ, we'll just fly you over for every Test series', then we just had to work out the calendar and if it was possible with the family and [wife] Becs and her work." Coming in last year as a backs and attack coach, mainly, the Pumas had a good '24, beating the All Blacks, Springboks and Wallabies in one Rugby Championship season for the first time — and so far they're the only team to have beaten this year's British and Irish Lions, in a warm-up game in Dublin. Along with the Pumas' other coaches, Lynn's contracted to the end of the 2027 Rugby World Cup, and says his job entails just being with the team about four months a year, working remotely the rest of the time. Though learning Spanish, he says their coaches' meetings are all conducted in French — "my Spanish is still a work-on and one of the coaches' English is a real work-on, but all four of us can speak French". As for their Queenstown move, "we were looking at maybe staying in Dunedin and getting a place over here to come in the summers, but we thought, 'why not just give it a go?"' The advantage is Becs' parents live in Queenstown — her dad's legendary former Southland breakfast radio host John 'Boggy' McDowell — and aside from the international airport also being handy, "we'd always wanted to be around here". So far they're loving it — his 8-year-old twin boys play Arrowtown junior rugby, while he's also popped along to two of the Arrowtown Premiers trainings. "In the summer I might be able to help out a little bit more, but we'll see."
