Waning interest goes beyond Super Rugby and predictable wins
Hardly a week goes by without a commentator or scribe somewhere questioning the future of Super Rugby, but is it the competition that is under threat or the sport itself?
The enthusiasm that was evident when slightly better crowds attended the derby matches in Cape Town and Pretoria over the past two weekends was evidence of how much the interest has waned. A few years ago those crowds would have been much bigger.
What is particularly concerning is that the tournament could not be in a more interesting phase from a local viewpoint. All five teams in the conference have a chance of winning it, and both derby matches produced top-quality rugby. And yet the attendance at the Stormers match against the Chiefs on Saturday dropped by 12,000 from seven days earlier.
The concern is not just limited to SA.
The freaky come-frombehind win the Crusaders scored over the Waratahs stretched the Kiwi winning sequence over Australian teams to 39 games and wouldn’t have pleased Australian rugby boss Raelene Castle, who criticised the competition the previous week for its predictability.
Castle said that because of the New Zealand dominance, the competition lacked the key ingredient of “uncertainty of outcome”.
She said that “the hope that when you buy a ticket and sit down you believe your team can win” should be what the competition strives for.
She is right about the predictability aspect, but that wouldn’t explain any apathy in SA, where it is almost impossible to divide the teams and predict outcomes with any assurance. It also doesn’t explain why even in New Zealand, support of the sport appears to be shrinking.
Super Rugby is the issue now because it is May, but if it was August then the Currie Cup and the Rugby Championship would be under the spotlight. There has been a waning of interest there too, and while European rugby looks vibrant when we watch a club final, generally the better atmosphere we perceive north of the equator comes about because the clubs play in much smaller venues. Most of the European clubs are losing money.
There are issues with Super Rugby, but the fall-off in support is probably related to more universal issues afflicting the sport — issues such as an overcomplicated law book, which allows individual refereeing interpretations to have too much influence, and the fact that the sport is evolving to a point where coaches are just becoming too clever.
That latter point relates among other things to the way that defence, and the coaching of defence, has become such a science and how it has affected rugby’s aesthetic value.
With line-speed becoming a buzzword of the modern game and now being accepted as necessary even by those coaches who were previously doubters, the challenge will get even bigger.
It will be only a matter of time before the law makers come up with some remedy that will complicate the law book even further.
The more the sport evolves, the more pressure there is for the law makers to stay ahead of the game, and what they come up with often doesn’t help.
For instance, adjusting the laws to favour the attacking team sounds good in practice but when you get to the nitty-gritty it often does the opposite.
The way it stands, for example, if an attacking team is held up on the line, they get the benefit of the feed at the resultant scrum. Wouldn’t it place the onus on the attacking team to be more adventurous, meaning try something other than just monotonously drive the forwards at the line, if it was the defending team that received the put-in?
Is it good for the sport that a few generations of people possibly do not recognise it as the same sport with which they grew up and played?
Is it good that scrums are now as often seen as a vehicle to force a penalty as they are a starting point for attack, and that so many referees, because of the myriad laws that apply, don’t appear to have a clue about the scrums and just blow them arbitrarily?
The ease with which referees wave yellow cards and thus render it an unequal contest and the interminable amount of time referees spend conferring with TMOs detracts from the pace and flow of the entertainment.
This is by no means an allinclusive list. It’s why we are not just looking at a Rugby problem.