How spread out is the rugby fandom beyond the higher population areas in the south - Perth/Dundee west to Irvine/Ayr etc? Because if 90% of the fans are in that area then it does make a lot of sense to play so much in Murrayfield - especially if the tickets are selling. Its just so much closer than most rugby fans in NZ.

But I agree with you, its hard to get your local people interested in the game if you don’t bring the game to them!

Its pretty hard to say. Super Rugby’s success drained interest from NPC, but as noted below Super Rugby just doesn’t spread itself around New Zealand much anymore and there are large population bases that don’t get many games nearby. One NZs largest population centres in Bay of Plenty has a 3 hour round trip to get to a Super Rugby match, and there just aren’t that many folks who will do that for a 7pm kick off.

Palmerston North - Wellington is a 3hr30m round trip, Whangarei to Auckland is 4 hours, Napier to Wellington is 8 hours, Nelson to Christchurch is 10 hours. You might do those trips for an All Blacks test match, but you’d have to be fairly die hard to do it for what is in effect just a quite high level club footie game.

So my thinking with that fantasy franchise setup is to get back to 12 teams in Super Rugby, make the Australian clubs more competitive and then in order to balance downgrading the NPC move Super to a double round-robin (same as the NRL is). That’s 22 regular season games which is a lot more than now which helps the franchises make more money (because the live attendance is much more important for them) and more matches gives them the flexibility to spread them around a lot more.

The NPC would have to make way to give this competition room - potentially splitting into a smaller, more development focused regional series and proud provinces like Hawkes Bay would have to accept the trade of Super Rugby games instead of NPC filling McLean Park. But getting 4-5 guaranteed Super Rugby games a year with a new Eastern franchise splitting the remaining 6-7 with Rotorua & Mt Maunganui is a hell of a lot better than 1 every other year.

Cost cap… there’s a lot of merit to spreading the talent around but i’d have to think about how it could work in the NZ context.

Just splitting points into different comments because i’m terrible at excessive word counts :)

Can’t demote anybody to the NPC from Super Rugby as they’re completely separate competitions. Eg the Highlanders are in effect already playing NPC, just as their constituent parts - Southland & Otago.

In part a move to expand the NZ based franchises to 7 teams is to alleviate what NZR want to do to the NPC (along with their media pundits) which is to completely trash it as its costing so much money and not pulling in huge eyeballs.

There’s a big contrast between stories like the below, where Hawke’s Bay have made profits 25 years running compared to most of the provincial unions which are constantly spending below their means and being a net drain on NZR.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/money-ball-how-hawkes-bay-rugby-has-defied-the-new-zealand-sporting-credit-crunch/YHLRKMVNY5G3ZCKFIKTML2WOZU/

So as much as I hate the idea, the NPC probably does have to change to downgrade its expense, but if that’s not coupled with expansion of Super my fear is that NZ will grow increasingly disconnected from Rugby and NZR will essentially be biting the hand that feeds.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but due to a couple of things (geography & number of games) less clubs in Super Rugby is actually worse for attendance.

Per game attendance is ok, but there aren’t enough games to let the franchises boost their revenue, so more teams = more games. Also, more games = more chance of hosting a game in places that rarely see a Super match which might boost interest and average attendance due to not saturating markets.

Taranaki used to be a part of the Hurricanes franchise, but they left to join the Chiefs with an agreement to get a guaranteed match every year in New Plymouth. This was because back then the Hurricanes would only play 2 matches a year outside of Wellington and it was rotated between Hawke’s Bay, Manawatū and Taranaki. Things have gotten worse since then as now the Hurricanes play a maximum of 1 match outside of Wellington and its almost always against a poor draw like the Western Force.

The reason I believe its important to play games in the provinces is because otherwise you have huge chunks of population missing out on live Super Rugby altogether, almost nobody is driving the 4+ hours from Napier to Wellington to watch a Super game.

I’m very left wing so obviously my opinion is very biased in that direction, but I think Key gets a great deal of pump up from the political commentary classes because he did the politicking part of running a government successfully. He was able to keep the National party on message, was able to fudge away a bunch of different controversies without getting tarred by them and is still probably the most popular National leader of the last 20+ years.

However, if we look back at what Key’s government actually did its pretty clear to me that the outcomes of their policies are bad, are being felt now and will be felt for a long time to come.

As one example, tax cut obsession, plus austerity during and after the GFC downturn has seen a huge degradation and under-investment in infrastructure. The only reason they “balanced” budgets is by not putting money in where it was needed. That’s why Dunedin, Nelson, Hawke’s Bay etc are so desperate for new hospitals and why they are so expensive now.

Its a bit of a blunt exaggeration but the infrastructure you build today is almost always going to be cheaper than what you build tomorrow. And then the infrastructure they did build, such as Transmission Gully, was done as a PPP, which in the long run basically always costs more than doing it ourselves. Massive over-investment in roading and under-investment in rail & coastal shipping also locked in (and now Simeon is doubling down) transport emissions for decades.

Like a whole lot of the decisions of this government, its campaigning. Political theatre to play up fears & misconceptions of a segment of voters.

What sort of vessel are you travelling in?

I’ve never seen a thing like this before, both players were ruled to have lifted simultaneously, both contributing equally to the foul play and both were given a yellow. Somehow the Magpies only managed to score 1 try while against 13 players and almost conceded one too.

Sam Smith, the Hawke’s Bay 7 being lifted here tucked his head & rolled so actually came down quite safely all things considered and played out the rest of the match A-OK.

Yeah first phase Australia looked much better, and they were also more patient were able to build phases and still look like they had a plan going deep into them. After 5 or 6 phases the ABs attack fairly consistently fell apart and looked like it didn’t really have a successful out.

Pretty consistently through this year though its the out wide defence and then lack of punch on gain line that’s the worry heading up north. Defence in particular has gone backwards this year, the system looks very exploitable.

Still think Razor was a bit slow on pulling the trigger on getting the bench on, but the forwards replacements in particular did really well once they were on.

The question from the game is, has Schmidt coached a bunch of lesser players to perform well above their #10 ranking, or are Razor’s ABs just that clunky at the moment?

As I type, the ABs have only 18 minutes to build a lead before the final quarter begins and we get to see if they’ll be shut out 6 games in a row.

Well I didn’t expect my prediction for the Magpies to be bang on. Crazy game.

First time I’ve ever seen two players get sinbinned a simultaneous action of foul play.

Schmidt’s still got it with the set plays eh, they’re right in the hunt.

I was so impressed with the quality of the Bronco that I bought one of their Rambler’s as well. I use that when I just want to grill a couple of steaks for dinner, but my partner also bought be one of the Espeto Sul rotisseries, and I use that with the Rambler as its just about the perfect length for it. I got my brother to fabricate a baffle which lets me hold the lid open, but still keep the box closed for proper air draw & whatnot - its been great for chicken roasts!

I’m quite keen on their offset smokers too, but part of the deal with buying the Bronco was I had to get rid of one of my other BBQs (sold an old Weber Kettle) so I doubt i’ll get the thumbs up to add another even bigger one to our collection!

Naturally, and with this government we’re not going to get Aussie style protections around work hours any time soon - but if your employer is going to say, you must be in office bc contract says so, the response should be ok well contract also says work hours are x-y thank you very much.

I meant to post this earlier - its an explainer on how West Kentucky ended up with Mutton BBQ and you’ll see why I was instantly hooked that it was something New Zealand should be doing too.

https://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/03/13/a-year-of-barbecue-kentucky-mutton/

I tend to wrap ribs pretty early in butcher paper (my butcher wraps everything, even if its in a vac bag in butcher paper so I get a supply without trying :) and that really helps to keep them moist. I do the same for bigger chunks of meat to get through the stall as well.

Yeah I was using HA to figure out presence from Unifi and that was very flakey as well. Have a look at Unpoller though, its a decent project and can push metrics to influxdb or prometheus.

Its only recent releases of Unifi Network that have made it easy to setup local DNS entries - it used to be very kludgy or not possible back when I first deployed PiHole as DNS for me.

I really like the frigate project, and the detection models it has are really really good, and that meant I could use really cheap Amcrest (I think) cameras because the brains was on the server end rather than camera end. Plus I kinda prefer the device side to be as dumb as possible as they can often have all sorts of vulnerabilities baked in the more IoT they are.

Though I also really hate Home Assistant so I use Frigate as a standalone app, and I manage notifications in a somewhat roundabout way (mqtt -> loki -> grafana -> pushover). I did that because I got heartily sick of how awful Home Assistant was at determining whether I was, or was not at home.

So now I use Unpoller to get my device states from the UDM, that gets stored in prometheus, and my Grafana alert rule works out if my partner or I are at home based on our device being connected to the WiFi or not; then each MQTT event for a detection it only sends a notification if both phones are away.