New Zealand first, and the rest are labouring behind
OPINION: Rebels coach Dave Wessels called the Hurricanes the ‘‘Manchester United of rugby’’ in the wake of his side’s thrashing in Melbourne on Friday.
It was a comment familiar to anyone who has watched English football.
Here was a lower-league manager explaining the difference between his side and the EPL elite after a 4-1 beating that had started promisingly but ended in tears.
It is now a pretence that the Australian conference and the New Zealand conference are on the same level. Super Rugby is now split by quality, not geography.
This country is now the Premier League. Australian and South Africa are the Championship (south and north). That is a both a celebration of New Zealand excellence and potentially the source of great uncertainty.
To the good news first. New Zealand continues to spit out players at an unbelievable rate. I could laugh at my generation, the middle-aged, when they grizzle about the kids today.
The truth is that young professional rugby players are fitter, more disciplined and more professional than they were back in the day.
No 10s are going from the under 20s program to full All Blacks status in three years.
Combine that with New Zealand’s first-rate administration and you have a relentless, efficient rugby machine.
Over the past five years Kiwi teams have won Super Rugby four times. In the five years before that they had two wins.
And it’s not just the rate of success that is important, it’s the nature. These days it’s shared around. Since 2013, only the Blues
have failed to win the competition.
Hurricanes coach Chris Boyd was tremendously polite during the halftime interview on Friday when asked if the game lived up to the intensity of Kiwi derbies. The short answer was no. Twenty minutes later he was giving Beauden Barrett – who had a dream night – a rest on the bench.
In 2018, when foreign teams play Kiwis they’re looking for the win but they settle for respectability.
There could be four Kiwi sides in the semifinals this year and not a single New Zealander would bat an eyelid.
But be a bit careful before you get the trumpets and champagne
out. If you think the Australian sporting public is in a constant state of torment about this losing streak you’re overestimating how much they care.
They have turned away from Super Rugby. Only 77,000 tuned in to see the Brumbies v Waratahs game on pay TV on Saturday, and a fair chunk of them were the expat Kiwis and South Africans who had been watching the Blues take on the Sharks.
By comparison 281,000 watched the NRL game between Wests Tigers and Parramatta on Monday.
The Rebels were indeed put back in their box by the Hurricanes but Kiwis should be careful that box isn’t actually a coffin.
This is where the uncertainty comes in. When the next broadcast deal is worked out later this year, how will Australia and South Africa react to a competition that has changed so fundamentally since its inception?
The move to conferences isn’t the big shift, it’s the fact that only one of these conferences has a strong likelihood of producing a winner. What is the appetite of Australian and South African audiences to keep paying for a competition their sides can’t win?
It is now two years since the Hurricanes lost a single game to an Aussie side. Wessels was right. They are Manchester United, under Alex Ferguson on a good day, and the rest of New Zealand isn’t far behind them.