Nothing very super about Super Rugby
The Super Rugby season has started and the SANZAR chief executive have come out slugging, claiming that this competition is the best league in the world.
The Premiership and Top 14 bosses don’t seem to need publicly to defend their competitions in that way, and I suspect that Super Rugby’s Andy Marinos has reacted simply because there has been so much criticism of the way things are set up in the Southern Hemisphere.
When you look at the arguments put forward by Marinos, it tells you a lot about what motivates him and his colleagues. Apparently, points scored per match increased from 45.3 to 52.0 last season, while tries were up 5.1 to 6.4 per match. I’m sure Marinos wouldn’t appreciate the suggestion that might show how sloppy Super Rugby defences were, but that’s just as valid as suggesting that those metrics are a measure of quality.
Equally, I doubt he’d like it if I said that ignoring forward passes, in the way Super Rugby often does, was a contributory factor to the number of tries scored! It’s always dangerI when you head down the statistics road as it might just backfire on you.
If it’s meaningless numbers you’re after, then Marinos’ claim that Super Rugby attracted an audience of 50 million in 2016, a number that ‘is up on any other rugby competition in the world’ has to be very questionable.
The Premiership has a US broadcast rights deal, which shows a game of the week on one of NBC’s cable and satellite channels that’s available in 85 million US households, and they also show Premiership matches on their live streaming service. Genuine audience figures are hard to get, but I doubt it’s as cut and dried as Marinos asserts.
Whether or not Super Rugby floats your boat, the fact is that he is, to some extent, putting lipstick on a pig.
The former SANZAR boss, Greg Peters, has described the current number of 18 teams as being ‘not optimal’ and there’s talk of the Aussies and Saffers each dropping one of their franchises – that’s not something you do if everything in the garden is rosy.
There’s too much travelling, as there always will be if teams are split across Argentina, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and to accommodate that the structure makes the Anglo-Welsh Cup look easy to understand! Leagues where a team do not play every other team home and away, are frankly a bit of a joke, but if you have franous chises encompassing 14 time zones, then you need to come up with something a bit strange.
However, the biggest problem with Super Rugby is that last year it just wasn’t competitive, with the New Zealand franchises dominating.
There was a case to be made a few years ago that the skill level in Super Rugby was better than in the Premiership, but I’m not convinced that’s still the case.
Most of the better Premiership sides have adopted an offloading style of play, and watching the early matches in this year’s Super 18, I really couldn’t see anything to separate the north and the south, other than that our league has a proper, workable structure.
worry about where Marinos’ and other southern administrators’ obsession with tries and points might take us. Nick Cain has argued the case for a return to proper scrum feeds, and the same point can be made about straight throws at the lineout: add in turning a blind eye to the occasional forward pass, and there’s a pervasive move towards changing the nature of the game through disregarding the laws. That simply has to stop.
As calls continue for promotion and relegation to be introduced in the Six Nations, the competition’s chief executive, John Feehan told us that the Six Nations ‘is a closed competition controlled by the Unions’, that World Rugby has no input into it, and that it’s his team’s job to run the tournament as they see fit.
What this made clear is that the Six Nations is first and foremost about making money for its owners – it may be a great sports event, but essentially it’s a business, no more and no less.
You have to wonder whether Feehan was wise to be so blunt about that at a time when the Six Nations is urgently searching for a new sponsor to replace RBS?