Sir Graham Lowe has confirmed that the Southern Orcas, the Christchurch group chasing the NRL’s twentieth licence, has put a four year contract in front of Scott Robertson to become the club’s first head coach.
The offer, first reported on Monday, would take the 51 year old from the top job in New Zealand rugby union to a rugby league team that does not yet exist. Lowe, who chairs the bid and coached the Kiwis, Manly, the North Queensland Cowboys and Queensland, told reporters the approach had caught Robertson off guard.
“I know it will take a lot of people by surprise but, yes, we have made ‘Razor’ a really competitive and official offer. We have faith in Razor,” Lowe said, in comments reported by 1News.
Lowe set out the terms plainly. “We’ve offered Scott a four-year contract to be a head coach, and so it’s with him and his management, and they’re considering it at the moment,” he said, in remarks carried by Zero Tackle.
The obvious objection is that Robertson has never coached rugby league at any level. Lowe got to it before anyone else could. “We’re well aware that he’s not coached rugby league before, but he’s certainly got a good handle on rugby league and has been looking at it closely,” he said. “We’ll have experienced assistants around him. We think it’ll be a great coup for us.”
What the Orcas are buying, on Lowe’s account, is a name and a temperament rather than a technical rugby league brain. “There wouldn’t be a more well-known guy certainly in the South Island and Canterbury, he brings a lot of the Canterbury pride,” Lowe told Sportnation, adding that “he’s a leader and he’s a coach of sport and he understands the language of sport”.
Robertson has not responded publicly. Through a spokesperson he said he has fielded a number of approaches since leaving the All Blacks and would not comment on any particular one, RNZ reported. The Orcas have said they are not putting a clock on him.
He has been out of a full time job since January, when New Zealand Rugby ended his tenure two years into a four year term after the 2025 end of season review. The announcement on the All Blacks website confirmed his departure as head coach. Dave Rennie was appointed in March and is currently leading the side through its long tour of South Africa. Before the national job, Robertson took the Crusaders to seven straight Super Rugby titles between 2017 and 2023, a run no other coach in the competition has matched. His only work since the sacking has been a short stint with the Barbarians alongside Argentina coach Felipe Contepomi.
The catch in the offer is a big one. There is no team yet. The Orcas are one of several parties bidding for a licence that the Australian Rugby League Commission has not yet awarded, and the contract only becomes real if the bid does. The club has said it is aiming for a 2029 debut, which would follow the Perth Bears entering the competition in 2027 and the Papua New Guinea Chiefs in 2028.
Behind the Orcas is a bid valued at about $360 million New Zealand dollars, including the licence fee the NRL will charge for the twentieth spot. The managing director is Andrew Chalmers, a former chairman of the New Zealand Rugby League who also owned the Bradford Bulls in England. The bid has announced that the Carter Group would provide about ten hectares of land near Rolleston for a multi sport centre of excellence that would serve as the club’s long term training base, a deal reported by the New Zealand Herald.
Home games would be played at One New Zealand Stadium, the covered ground in central Christchurch. Venues Ōtautahi has supplied indicative hire pricing to three separate parties working on NRL bids, and Christchurch City Council officials have moved from general talks with the league to working through commercial detail after NRL representatives visited the city in June, according to further Herald reporting. That is a long way short of a licence, but it is further than any previous South Island push has got.
A second New Zealand club in the NRL would change the shape of the competition here. The Warriors have carried the whole country on their own since 1995, and a Christchurch side would give the South Island a professional league team for the first time. It would also create a genuine derby, and a domestic market for players who currently have one NRL employer at home or none.
The Robertson offer is the part that has travelled furthest. It was picked up in Australia, in South Africa and in Britain within hours, with RugbyPass among the outlets running it. For a bid that needs to look serious to the commission in Sydney and to sponsors at home, that is not an accident. Naming a coach who is known in every rugby household in the country is a way of telling the NRL that the Orcas are not a hobby project.
Whether Robertson takes it is another question. He has spoken before about wanting another crack at the top level, and a rugby union return remains open to him with three years to run before the 2027 World Cup and club jobs in Japan, France and England regularly available to coaches with his record. Taking the Orcas job would mean waiting years for a first game, learning a new code in public, and accepting that the whole thing collapses if the licence goes to a rival bid such as the second Queensland proposal.
Lowe, for his part, is not hiding his hope. “We’re really proud we have made the offer to Scott and we are hopeful that he is going to accept it,” he said.
What do you think, should Razor swap codes and take the Christchurch job, or hold out for another rugby union role? Leave a comment below and tell us how you see it.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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