On Borrowed Time
It's all too easy to get the wrong end of the stick about rugby's state of health in New Zealand.
The All Blacks have been world number one since 2009, are chasing a third consecutive World Cup and are the team that everyone still most admires.
New Zealand's teams have also dominated Super Rugby since 2012 – winning seven of the last eight titles, which would have been eight had the Crusaders not been denied by a wrong call by the referee in the 2014 final.
The Mitre 10 Cup continues to be a strong and compelling competition and because schoolboy rugby has been part of the broadcast landscape for the last decade, everyone can see that the standards at First XV are high across the country.
But, to some extent, this picture of rugby being in rude health is an illusion as the schools and grassroots are in trouble.
Schools rugby is actually in a particularly bad place right now but no one tends to see that because of the prominence of First XV.
That, though, is the essence of the problem: schools have ploughed so much of their resource into the elite that they have alienated huge numbers of
