Super Rugby sucks: Cut corporate gobbledygook and join with Oz
New Zealand Rugby boss Mark Robinson’s statement this week about Super Rugby was as depressing as the competition itself. It was loaded with jargon and inferences that Super Rugby was credible.
He wants rugby to win a new audience and stay “relevant” but was using the sort of language which would make most kids, and a lot of adults, run a mile.
Our rugby leaders, coaches, players and commentators need to stop patronising their audience, and start treating us with respect. Give us quality information and opinions and give it to us straight.
They need to understand sport as pop culture, rather than hand-onheart Kiwis trying to bravely win a World Cup all the time.
Robinson reckoned Super Rugby is “strong and admired”.
No it isn’t. We all know that. Super Rugby was always a contrivance, a roaring success in its infancy which has become a disaster which is driving people away. Super Rugby sucks. Some things aren’t meant to last, and the sooner it is scrapped the better.
Rugby Australia chairman Paul McLean, as quoted in The Australian newspaper, says New Zealand knows Super Rugby is on the rocks. What may be taking shape is a permanent transtasman competition in Super Rugby’s place.
I’ve long believed this is the direction rugby should go.
New Zealand and Australia must aim to set up a league of such quality that they can sell it to the world via broadcast rights.
Fans are divorced from the game because many Super Rugby matches are played when they are asleep. Those games are also poorly covered media-wise, and we have little understanding or interest in what is going on in Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.
Rugby must reconnect to the people via the provincial systems but in a new way.
It needs to properly privatise the game with genuine professional clubs, which will encourage people with ambition, drive and ideas to become involved and find their own solutions to things such as keeping star players in this country. Teams with new vibrant identities and star personalities must emerge for rugby to survive.
Yes, we will lose some players overseas. But that’s already happening.
New Zealand Rugby has squashed the joy out of the game and stopped rugby growing in a modern way.
Treating the game as branch offices of the All Blacks wrecked tribalism and rivalries. Australia, meanwhile, cooked its game by spreading rugby too far and wide.
The old rivalry between Queensland and New South Wales is a classic example of what makes a sport successful.
My rugby solution: I’d promote a 10 or 12 team transtasman league.
And I’d suggest to New Zealand Rugby that they start talking to the public in a language which doesn’t sound like corporate gobbledygook.
The game has to stop blathering on about pathways and stakeholders.
Rugby can no longer operate in a bubble. It belongs with everything and everyone from the NRL, NBA, EPL, Indian T20 cricket and kabaddi to LeBron James, Steven Adams, Israel Adesanya, Tyson Fury, Tom Brady, Virat Kohli and Mo Salah.
Winning games and World Cups hasn’t been the barometer for true success for a long time. Some colourful, forthright, outspoken administrators would even help.
What I fear about yet another rugby review is they have loaded it up with rugby heads who can’t look outside the borders. They are the same sort of people who somehow overlooked Scott Robertson for the All Blacks coaching job.
The Australian sports scene is far more competitive, and has to be more realistic.
McLean made some sense. Robinson made me wonder if New Zealand rugby would ever join the real world.
Our rugby leaders, coaches, players and commentators need to stop patronising their audience, and start treating us with respect. Give us quality information and opinions and give it to us straight.