RUGBY COMMITTEE INCONSISTENT Club Bias Responsible For Dropping Selector

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31657, 18 April 1968, Page 11

RUGBY COMMITTEE INCONSISTENT Club Bias Responsible For Dropping Selector

(By

1. J. D. HALL)

It is unfortunate that the Canterbury Rugby Union management committee, a body which sets some store on continuity of membership and on members not directly representing clubs, apparently has discarded both principles in choosing the Canterbury back selector for this season.

The dropping of Mr G. T. Nolan will cause many Rugby followers to echo the admirably forthright question posed by Mr C. H. McPhail, president of the Canterbury Rugby Union: “What does a selector have to do to stay in power?”

The qualifications of the new back selector, Mr M. J. Dixon, are I well known, and there is no doubt that he i will again be a most competent selector. Also, he will be able to appreciate the present situi ation, for, in 1966, he suff- ■ ered the same summary | treatment from the management committee, when i he was dropped in' favour ! of Mr Nolan. | Mr Nolan, however, might feel thlat he has been treated rather shabbily by the Canterbury Rugby Union. In his two years as a back selector, the Canterbury backs produced some very fine Rugby, and last season they were the best combination in New Zealand. All Black Trend By hi- insistence on aggressive and positive play, Mr I Nolan anticipated the trend now apparent in All Black i Rugby. It is a tribute to his coaching that W. F. McCormick, W. ID. Cottrell and A. G. Steel were chosen for the 1967 All ' Black teams. [ Why, then, did the manage-

ment committee decide to replace Mr Nolan after voting him in in 1966 ahead of Mr Dixon, and reaffirming that decision in 1967 when Mr Dixon again stood against Mr Nolan?

plaint made was that Mr Nolan had not introduced many new players to the Canterbury team, but had relied largely on players who had been selected by Mr Dixon. Influenced By Club*

Obviously it could not be because of Mr Nolan's record of coaching and selecting. The performance of Canterbury in 1966 and 1967 statistically refutes that. I Members Upset ! It may well be that some (members of the management committee, upset because certain of the their club members were not chosen for Canterbury, had decided even last year that Mr Nolan bad to be replaced. Normally, parochial views such as these carry little weight, but apparently a putsch was started and it gained enough support to displace Mr Nolan. It seems that the main complaint against Mr Nolan's selections was that he introduced the youthful, but very promising, L. Dickson to representative Rugby, and that he ignored the claims of several high-scoring club wings and used members of his squad out of position on the wing. Another rather odd com-

That is facile reasoning. B. A. Watt, D. A. Arnold and McCormick were playing fur Canterbury before Mr Dixon became a coach. As for the others, was Mr Nolan supposed to drop established players simply because they had played for Canterburybefore he became a selector? .The distressing part about all of this, is that after all the opposition at the annual meeting to increasing the management committee because it might lead to direct club representation, members of the management committee apparently have been influenced by their club affiliations in deciding on their choice of a selector. If Canterbury had had a poor record last season and the backs Mr Nolan chose had not played well, there might have been some basis for the background complaints: but his record can stand by itself.

j At least he was consistent in his selections; the management committee is not. Direction Ignored This year, the management committee asked that clubs making nominations for selectors should advise the qualifications of their nominees. It [seems that this direction from the committee had no [ bearing at all on the selec- [ tion. Apparently, even before nominations closed, Mr Nolan I had beard through the grapevine that his place was in jeopardy, which means that; there had been enough lobbying done beforehand to make the formal reading out ■ of qualifications to the com- i mittee superfluous.

It is a sad state of affairs if a representative selector is judged not on his record, but on the players he did not choose. However, Mr Nolan can take some solace from the fact that he is not the first victim of the management committee’s inconsistency when choosing a back selector. Mr D. P. White, who chose P. J. Creedy ahead of P. B. Vincent, and Mr W. A. Clark, who committed the sin of dropping S. K. Henderson as a second five-eighths, suffered the same fate.