Rekindling a long lost relationship with Super Rugby

I found myself finding reasons for not going to games. One week it would be the bad weather, then it would be the cost or the fact that the team sucked.

I’ve been thinking a bit about Super Rugby lately.

We’ve been estranged for a few years now. There was really no single reason for the breakup. It was a number of things.

It all started the mid-to-late nineties, when Super Rugby was a much younger, slimmer competition. There were just twelve teams – three from Australia, four from South Africa and five from New Zealand. Every team played every other team every year. It was uncomplicated and fun.

Being good keen Manawatu boys, my brother and I became devoted Hurricanes fans. It was an easy team to support back then. Sure, they were consistently inconsistent and were rarely in playoff contention. More than any other team, however, they had a real commitment to being a team of and for their entire catchment area. Every year saw games in Palmerston North, New Plymouth and Napier.

This persisted from boyhood all the way through to adolescence. Then we started drifting apart.

It all started when I moved to Wellington for varsity. I flatted in the suburb of Thorndon, which was just a short walk to the Cake Tin. If I wanted, I could go to four or five home games a year. This was great at first but, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt.

I found myself finding reasons for not going to games. One week it would be the bad weather, then it would be the cost or the fact that the team sucked. There was always an excuse. In time, I found myself not being bothered to go along at all.

Then in 2006, a change to New Zealand’s domestic rugby affairs saw Manawatu escape the second division of the old NPC and be returned to the top tier of provincial rugby once more.

As a sporting spectacle, the competition may have been less exciting than Super Rugby, but it also had a heart and sense of history that the newer tournament couldn’t match.

Whether Manawatu could beat Hawkes Bay, Taranaki and Wellington mattered much more to me than whether the Hurricanes, being an amalgam of the four, performed against a Super Rugby field largely consisting of other artificially constructed teams. Heart and soil beats glitz and glamour.

At the same time it seemed that the Hurricanes were becoming increasingly concentrated in Wellington. The team ventured outside of that city more and more rarely, despite lower and lower attendance figures. Promising local players were overlooked and swiftly snaffled by other franchises – where some of them developed into All Blacks.

For a few years I papered over this by pretending to support the Chiefs, where former Manawatu coach Dave Rennie and first-five Aaron Cruden had helped guide the franchise to back-to-back championships. But if supporting a team based in Wellington was a bit of a stretch, supporting one based in Hamilton was never going to be sustainable.

Then came cancellation of our SKY subscription. Staring down the barrel of years of mortgage repayments and mouths to feed, getting rid of pay TV was a nobrainer. On the whole, it felt good to be liberated from paying around a thousand dollars a year for fifty or so channels I never wanted just so I could have the privilege of watching live sport.

But my commitment to the competition could not survive the loss of convenience. I was willing to watch the All Blacks and the ITM Cup in pubs or at the homes of friends and families. But with my relationship with Super Rugby already on the rocks, the loss of convenience was a death blow.

And that’s how it was until a few weeks ago, when circumstances sucked me into watching the later stages of this year’s group stages. By Saturday, enough interest had been rekindled that I decided I would give the thing another go. I tagged along with a few colleagues to watch the Hurricanes trash the Sharks in windy, rainy and cold Wellington.

And to be honest, I was kind of blown away by how well the Hurricanes played. Despite the conditions, it was one of the most enjoyable games I had seen in a long time. I had kind of forgotten just what a high standard of play Super Rugby can feature at its best.

So I’m back on board. With the Hurricanes now having won six games in a row, I know I’m open to accusations of being a fair weather friend. I’ll just have to wear that.

I’m not saying that I’m ready for a close relationship. The tournament isn’t the same, pure competition it was in 1998. I’m not the same, innocent 12-year-old boy collecting Super Rugby player cards from petrol stations that same year. Some unresolved issues remain.

But I am saying I’d like to try being friends.