Breakfast's Hayley Holt says the Haka is 'over-used'

Hayley Holt has taken a shot at the Haka, suggesting our international sports teams should stop performing them before games.

The TVNZ Breakfast presenter voiced her opinion after the Tall Blacks performance of the haka was ignored by their opponents Montenegro during the warm-up at the Basketball World Cup.

Holt reckoned the haka should go, saying, "Why do it? Nobody was really taking much notice."

"Should every single New Zealand team perform a haka?" she wondered. "Or is it overplayed and therefore being devalued?"

Fellow presenter John Campbell however, was not having a bar of it.

"The question makes me cross," he said. "I'm not cross with you, a little bit cross, but it's not performed by every single team is it? It's just performed by the teams that want to perform it."

Holt tried to back track, claiming that she "loved the haka," before adding the qualifier, "when it's beautiful and done seriously."

"The All Blacks take it so seriously, they learn the meaning behind all of the words and they spend a lot of time training on a haka, which is amazing, but sometimes it can seem... why?"

"I sometimes think it's done too much," she concluded.

Weatherman Matty McLean gave his 50 cents saying, "I sometimes wonder if its turned into a rugby thing as opposed to a cultural thing."

"True," nodded, Holt.

Breakfast's new newsreader, and former Silver Fern, Jenny May-Clarkson kept largely to herself during the debate before Campbell asked her if the New Zealand netball team performed a haka.

"No, we didn't," she replied, saying that the team instead performed waiata. She did note that the Black Ferns, the New Zealand womens rugby team, do perform it.

"They do a banger," Campbell agreed.

"They know the words," she continued before saying to Holt, "We're making the assumption that the Tall Blacks don't actually know what they're doing and I know that they put a lot of time into it as well."

"For me, it's not about those of us at home watching it who believe that it's being overdone," she said. "It's about that team and what they believe is the whole purpose of why they're doing it. It's the challenge, they're laying down the challenge."

"The fact that Montenegro decided that they weren't going to acknowledge it, well, that's their right."