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Open Letter to S Jones, esq. |
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Written by His Bobness
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Wednesday, 12 July 2006 |
Sir/Madam,
I struggle to imagine what New Zealand must have done to your rugby columnist Stephen Jones for him to continue to slander All Black rugby with his bitter and twisted tirades. But Freud would have a field day.
The All Blacks are ranked by the IRB as the number one rugby team in the world. Yet the increasingly paranoid sounding Jones, in his every article about their victories, manages to zoom in on something to suggest they are not there on merit.
His latest slander is that their initial Tri-Nations victory over Australia was due to bad refereeing decisions. The fact is the Wallaby sinbinned had been warned twice by the South African referee about killing the ball and, when caught infringing a third time, talked back to the ref and was rightly ordered off for 10 minutes.
NZ won the game by a 20-point margin and dominated the Wallaby scrum. Despite pre-game hype that the Wallabies would dominate at lineout time, the All Blacks were at least at parity there. They dominated up front, they were ascendant in the loose and they made the tackles that counted - unlike the Wallabies. Yet we are led to believe by your myopic correspondent that Australia was robbed. Not even the most one-eyed Aussies think that!
Five years ago, Jones was bewailing Super 12 as basketball rugby with weak setpieces. Now, with the All Black scrum the best in the world he STILL will not give them credit. That he cannot admit their superiority is rapidly becoming a joke in this part of the world. In this, he reminds me of the Holocaust denier David Irving, so adept is he at denying the truth.
But what is most offensive about Jones' NZ-bashing tirades is his racist questioning of the right of those All Blacks not of European descent to represent New Zealand. The fact that New Zealand has the biggest Polynesian population of any country in the world seems lost on Jones. Most of the Polynesian All Blacks were born in NZ and those who were not, like the young Toeava (the "annexed Samoan" as Jones obscenely describes him), came with their parents to NZ at a very early age. They were not, as Jones continues to impugn, dragooned by All Black press gangs scouring the Pacific for talent. Polynesians move to NZ for the same reasons that the Irish emigrated to New York - in search of economic opportunity.But it seems that for Jones, only white people can consciously make those choices.
This is deeply offensive, wilfully inaccurate and if he were to make such claims in this part of the world, he would be dragged before the Press Council.
Jones is entitled to his wacky opinions, of course, but as a journalist he has a duty to his readers to get his facts right and not to defame an All Black team that every other commentator in the world recognises as the world's best at this point.
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