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Snedden opens up about 2011 World Cup
By DAVID LONG - Sunday News | Sunday, 20 April 2008
Snedden opens up about 2011 World Cup - Rugby news & coverage - Stuff.co.nz
With 41 months to go before the World Cup, Rugby New Zealand 2011 Ltd CEO Martin Snedden gave David Long a run down on how everything currently stands and what the current priorities are.
SUNDAY NEWS: You recently attended a International Leaders in Sport Conference in Auckland where you gave the keynote speech, how did it go?
MARTIN SNEDDEN: I sat in on a couple of sessions to have a look at what was happening, but I spent a lot of time talking to the people that were attending.
My speech was about how to put together the World Cup and how to manage the expectations of various people, from the IRB through to people of New Zealand.
The people I spoke to gave me pretty consistent feedback, which was really positive.
When you're working in a sports field you generally work in fairly small groups and the opportunity to have a variety of things to talk to people who have specialist experience in different areas doesn't arise unless you get people together in this type of conference.
SN: Which aspects of the World Cup are taking up your time at the moment?
MS: There's a huge amount of concentration on the match and team allocation process.
We're taking a very deliberate and exhaustive approach to dealing with the regions about where matches are going to go and where teams will be hosted.
What we've come to realise is often those decisions in the past, including in France, where made too quickly without people quite understanding what they were getting into on both sides of the coin.
So we've adopted a slow and intensive approach that really helps create the type of environment we're looking for before people are obliged to say `yes we're into this'.
Over the last couple of months we've started to really identify what we're doing with the accommodation challenges, we're now in very intense discussions with the hotel industry to secure the type of room inventory we're going to need for the tournament.
With each of these groups there's two sides, there's a business side and the other is people coming together with the common purpose of trying to make this tournament as good as it can be.
Clearly we have to reach a commercial arrangement with the players in the hotel industry, but at the same time we take them in as a partner to what we're doing and that have that association of being part of creating something that's going to be really important to New Zealand.
We're keen on getting people hooked on the idea that they're part of the delivery mechanism for the tournament.
Volunteers is a huge part at the moment. We're scoping out the whole nature of the volunteer programme, we're likely to have about 4,500 volunteers throughout New Zealand and it's not simple just to pluck them out of a hat, it's got to be properly prepared.
There's also a whole lot of operational stuff that you've just got to start ploughing your way through.
SN: Two IRB staff members are now based in Wellington to work on the World Cup, how is that working out?
MS: It's probably their two most senior managers who work on the World Cup, Kit McConnell, who's a New Zealander, and Ross Young.
They sit in our office and the beauty of having those guys here is that we can simply go across and have a cup of coffee and chat through an idea with them, you don't have to arrange telephone hook ups and god awful hours at night.
If you're dealing with people in Dublin someone is having to get up at the wrong time of the day to participate and it's not as personal as just having those guys here where you can develop relationships.
Ross is an incredible source of knowledge, he lived in Australia for two years before the World Cup there and three years before the World Cup in France, so he knows what works and what doesn't.
We're trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel with things that are obviously going to work and not go down blind alleys that might sound good at first flush, but when you get into it you realise they're not going to work.
Having them here is just amazing and we'll have a couple more later in the year.
One of the acknowledged failings of previous World Cups is that the two organisations running it, the IRB and the host organisation, have been running in parallel far too much rather than being totally integrated with each other.
Our philosophy right from the start has been to look for an integrated delivery of all this, which is something the IRB have bought into.
Having these people working from out of our office from this far out is a big part of that, so you're building up your personal and working relationships which is all so incredibly important in order to sort out what's right and wrong going forward.
SN: So you're pleased with how everything is ticking along then?
MS: Eden Park has been a big challenge but it feels like we're over the hump now and that's going down the right track.
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