What is this obsession that European clubs have with Kiwi Rugby players?

Question

The clubs are feasting at the decaying body of NZ Rugby, do they care, that the cost of their winning all that lays before them, may be the dismantling of NZ Rugby and all that goes with it.

Yet these are the very people who decry the basketball Rugby that they term Super 14 and dont want a bar of the ELVs, yet turn a blind eye to trawling the seas of NZ Rugby. Who are the hypocrites here?

Answer 1

Saying "they" don't want any of the ELVs is simply wrong.

It's just not true at all.

Some of them will be used next season.

A lot of the ELVs don't work. they were tried and made no improvement so we wont be using those ones. Neither will you.

As for players moving over, yeah.

It is destroying the game here in Europe and for you guys in NZ.

Our best players are now your old ABs who are no longer able to play international rugby, so you national team suffers.

Our national team cant get on the pitch as your boys are playing.

You can clearly see this 10 years on by looking at English football.

In the semi fanals of the Heiniken Cup last weekend all the key players were foreign (appart from O'Connel - but that's only 1 guy out of 88 players)

Answer 2

Guess New Zealand are the hypocrites.. you now realise what samoan fijians and tongans rugby supporters feel like.

Answer 3

Because they're good. The same reason that New Zealand takes much of it's talent from Fiji, Tonga and the like to the detriment of their game and world rugby as a whole.

Answer 4

What a great question! It frustrates me that eventually the best team will no longer be the country with the best home-grown skill. It'll now be the country who can afford the best players. Let's be honest, NZ just cant afford to keep players like Dan Carter (and others who have become overly commercialised) in the country, so they are leaving to play for other teams. Whats going to happen further along the track?

Answer 5

Hopefully those clubs run out of money soon.......

Answer 6

I think it's because the style of play is different, the northern hemisphere teams want to spice things up.  I see the northern teams as playing a giant chess match with the set pieces, and the southern teams are more attack oriented and faster paced.

Answer 7

its simple cuzz they wanna see  some real rugby played up there cuzzy

Answer 8

The NZ players are top quality, there is no doubt, as so obviously the overseas clubs want the players to improve their teams. but i agree at the same time the northern hemisphere rugby minds have repeatedly said that the southern hemisphere game is a load of rubbish, sevens style rugby. i think they have recently realised that however much they criticized the southern hemisphere game it was producing world class players through the super 14, and also it was dominating world international rugby. this was when the Europeans realized they 'needed' the southerners and so the mass exodus of NZ and also SA rugby players happened. the northern hemisphere's rugby brains and leaders were wrong, they are the hypocrites, not that they would ever admit it though.