Thrills and spills mask threat to the global game
Arare New Zealand loss and the first win in 35 years for Argentina in Australia on Saturday brought much talk of a changing of the rugby world order, and so entertaining were the games that it was posited that all was good in the rugby firmament.
The truth, as is often the case, is more complex and things are not what they seem. The Springboks’ traditional power was exemplified by Malcolm Marx and their hard work by Willie le Roux. After years of ineffectiveness the Boks have recovered their directness, but augmented it with creativity that makes them a far more dangerous team. Whereas before they could wear you down with the bludgeon, they can now fillet you with incisive thrusts like the tries scored by Aphiwe Dyantyi.
That said, it should be remembered that had Beauden Barrett kicked his conversions, the pulsating effort by South Africa would have fallen short. And whether you think Bok pressure caused them, the All Blacks made as many errors in one 15-minute period in the first half as they usually do all game.
Across the Tasman, Argentina were recording their first win over Australia in 35 years, and you cannot say they were lucky in any regard. What distinguished this performance from many before was Argentina’s comfort with the ball in broken play. Nobody has doubted their prowess in the set and in plays that can be perfected by rote. It has always been their lack of instinctive rugby which comes when games open up that held them back.
In flankers Pablo Matera and Marcos Kremer, they have hard workers but also instinctive support runners who can handle to boot. Similarly, when you have wingers like Bautista Delguy and Ramiro Moyano who do not panic when clean line breaks are made, you always have the potential to score tries.
The Pumas are no longer a team that scores in threes, although in Emiliano Boffelli they have a kicker who is effective from just inside his own half.
What we saw on Saturday was two teams starting to get their run to the World Cup right. For all their unique problems, South Africa have rarely been uncompetitive in this tournament; their record stands up against any other nation. Argentina, whose foray into the Super 15s in the guise of Los Jaguares did not look to be flourishing, are now seeing the benefits of having all their players exposed to higher-level rugby.
This makes England’s World Cup pool stage more daunting. As in 2015, one high-profile rugby nation will not reach the knockout stages. France and Argentina are both improving at the right time and the USA and Tonga will present a physical challenge, even if they are limited teams.
The results from the Rugby Championship have at least kept the tournament alive, and you could be forgiven for assuming such a good product means that the game and this competition are in rude health. This is not so.
The broadcast rights contract is valuable, but nowhere near lucrative enough for rugby to be in the convenient position of, say, Premier League football, where income from crowds and ancillary sponsorship do not really matter.
The present sponsorship climate is soft and the vast distance between continents prevents away support in numbers. Both grounds on Saturday had empty seats, though far more on the Gold Coast than in Wellington. The truth is that the wonderful rugby we saw at the weekend masks an international game in the southern hemisphere so delicately balanced that only small cash-flow problems could plunge three, if not all four participating unions, into financial difficulty. Little wonder that former Puma Agustin Pichot, the vice chair of World Rugby, has called for a fresh 10-year agreement between unions and clubs to save the international game from ruin.
We have reached the limit of what can be done to make the game more attractive, save improving the scrum. We cannot go on tinkering without losing the essence of what makes rugby different; it is not meant to be a high-scoring game like basketball.
The problem is not in the product, but in the structure and costs. The desire for more rugby has produced more games but diminishing returns, endangering player welfare and the game’s sustainability at the highest level.