THERE’s never any shortage of questions to be asked as to where rugby is heading. Are the laws perfect? Is Super Rugby what it should be? Is club rugby undervalued? Is the All Blacks dominance good for the game?
Three no’s and a not sure would be my immediate response to those posers.
All Black legend Sir John Kirwan said recently that he was becoming bored watching the All Blacks undefeated run. It’s not his own country’s team that sends him to sleep but rather those who are trying to catch up. His feelings are understandable. Without being unpatriotic, there was a percentage of cricket fans in this country during the early 2000’s who, while delighted by the winning ways of Steve Waugh and his troupe of flanneled superstars, quite often wished for a better contest than was been given by Australia’s opponents of the time.
While we all have our favourites, you go to sporting matches not to watch one team play but to watch two teams have a contest. The example the All Blacks is setting for the rest of the world ultimately has to be good for the code, but currently everyone else looks second rate so they need to catch up in a hurry.
As for club rugby being undervalued, don’t ask anyone involved in club rugby unless you’re looking for a very long conversation where you’re going to do most of the listening. Of course it is undervalued, and for all the changes in rugby since the professional era, it remains impossible to imagine the game being able to prosper long into the future without the foundation stone that is the club system. Like most problems, the sharing of money is at the root of the bickering and with funding for the national team, Super Rugby, the NRC and under age representative teams a costly business, clubs believe they are perceived as the lowest on the food chain.
There may well be no place on any food chain in a few years for one of Australia’s Super Rugby teams as SANZAR prepares to make the competition a less unwieldy beast than it currently is. A dog’s breakfast may be too harsh a term to use to describe the season just past but a confusing mess might hit the mark.
Eighteen AFL teams spread over one country gets tricky enough to follow, let alone 18 teams covering five countries, as is the case in Super Rugby’s current format. At least the AFL only has a couple of minor time zone issues whereas the involvement of South African and Argentinian teams means that Super Rugby goes missing at various times of the season, as whatever team you follows heads into these middle of the night fixtures.
My ideal solution is to make it a twelve team competition between five Australian teams six New Zealand teams and one combined Pacific Island team and leave other countries to their own devices.
The only non-ideal thing about my ideal solution is the messy little combination of broadcast deals and economic fallout. Such a shame.
As for the laws! Where do we start and can we ever stop? The scrums, the breakdown, the policing of the offside law and one of my personal favourites, the intentional knock-on law. If you can’t transfer the ball to your team-mate without an onside defender interfering with your pass, it should be your fault not theirs. Don’t get me started.
Nearly all of the coaches I had as a player used to bang on about rugby being a simple game. Who were they trying to kid?
