What’s wrong with Super Rugby?

The competition’s format and future has been a source of angst pretty much since its inception. But is it really that bad – and what are the alternatives?

It probably says something about the national psyche that there’s a long and questionable tradition of catastrophising over the state of our national game.

In 1973, then 29-year-old Chris Laidlaw, ex All Black and Rhodes Scholar, future ambassador, race relations conciliator and MP, wrote in his groundbreaking autobiography Mud In Your Eye, “I’m convinced that anyone over 50 firmly believes that the best days the sport will ever see have been and gone.”

Fast forward to 2010 when Laidlaw, by then well into his 60s, resoundingly validated his own thesis by peevishly deploring such blots on the rugby landscape as flamboyant hairstyles and coloured boots in his revealingly titled sequel Someone Stole My Game.

A few years earlier, veteran sportswriter Joseph Romanos had given us The Judas Game: The Betrayal of New Zealand Rugby. Portraying rugby as “a game in crisis,” he predicted: “There is every chance that within 30 years rugby will not be New Zealand’s national sport.”

A quarter of a century on, some would argue that Romanos was a visionary and his time-frame wasn’t all that far out. They’d cite as evidence the sparse – often to the point of embarrassment – crowds at Super Rugby Pacific (SRP) matches, (those at the new Te Kaha stadium in Christchurch being notable exceptions), the rise and rise of Auckland FC, the burgeoning nationwide enthusiasm for the Warriors and the growing sense that the All Blacks’ aura is fading before our eyes.

The source of much of the angst is SRP, the latest iteration of a competition that has reinvented itself as often as David Bowie, but with far less imagination. The Pacific branding will become grimly ironic unless some deep-pocketed white knight rides to the rescue of the insolvent Moana Pasifika franchise.

Predictable and poorly supported, so the argument goes, SRP is left for dead on almost every criteria by the juggernaut that is the NRL. It doesn’t prepare players for the pressure and attrition of international rugby; it’s a pale shadow of the exhilarating spectacle of the early, glory years when the Northern Hemisphere looked on with envy and trepidation. The pendulum has swung: now the European leagues, notably France’s Top 14, put SRP to shame when it comes to generating the tribalism, cut-throat competition and financial well-being that characterise successful competitions.

While there’s a danger that the notion SRP is a dud will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, this narrative is infused with selective nostalgia. Launched in 1996, Super Rugby’s golden era was relatively short. By the turn of the century, the novelty was already starting to wear off and the grumbling had begun.

A case in point is the frequent assertion that New Zealand Rugby’s (NZR) 2020 decision to freeze out the South African teams was a calamitous strategic error that robbed the tournament of a point of difference and contributed to the All Blacks’ decline by depriving our forwards of experience that could only be earned by getting trampled into the high veldt by gigantic Afrikaners.

The reality is that by 2002 questions were already being raised about the sustainability of a competition that traversed more time zones than the Trans-Siberian railway and featured South African derbies in the early hours that, for Aussie and Kiwi fans, were like trees that fall in the forest. For their part, the South Africans were already making eyes at Europe, commencing a flirtation that, in due course, blossomed into a meaningful relationship.

What can’t be denied, however, is that the timing of South Africa’s departure couldn’t have been much worse given rugby in the republic is on a historic high while Australian rugby continues to wallow in the trough of mediocrity that threatens to become its natural habitat.

Is there a viable alternative to SRP? There seem to be three options:

A tweaked status quo: retaining the current format but introducing a draft system and allowing trans-Tasman player movement to spread the talent and make the tournament more competitive.

Going big: creating a genuinely trans-national competition by bringing in South African provinces that don’t play in Europe along with teams from Japan, USA and Argentina.

Going it alone: creating a New Zealand version of the French Top 14 or the English premiership, i.e. the National Provincial Championship with added All Blacks. The preferred option of those who see it as the way to restore the tribalism that used to animate domestic rugby, this would be an expanded version of the Super Rugby Aotearoa (SRA) of the Covid years with new teams based in, say, Tauranga, Napier, New Plymouth, Nelson and Whangārei.

While SRA produced some compelling rugby, the players complained about the physical and mental demands of playing high-intensity derby matches week in, week out. But, as former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser observed: “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.”