Super Rugby: From Zinzan Brooke to Hoskins Sotutu - why this competition still sets the highest standard - Editorial

THE FACTS

Each year on February 14, a young Blues fan’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. That’s right, folks: It’s Zinzan Brooke’s birthday.

There is much about the modern game that would seem unfamiliar to the code played by the legendary Auckland No 8 – there were no TMO reviews of whatever deeds took place to defend the All Blacks’ line in the dying stages of the epic 1996 test in Pretoria. But Super Rugby (in whatever form it takes) is still the best competition in the world for high thrills and high-quality rugby. At its best, it is still true to the game Brooke delivered and inspired.

The Waiuku-born No 8’s flair, vision and brute physicality set a template for the competition when it launched in 1996. The focus of the series has sometimes swung between those points of flair, vision and physicality; there’s a common refrain from snobbish Northern Hemisphere types that this grade of rugby is too loose and never physical enough.

Ignore those fools. The overall quality of Super Rugby and the talented young men who play it is starkly underlined by the fact that since 1987, eight of the 10 Rugby World Cups that have been played have been won by sides whose regions feed into this competition. (Of the remaining two, 2003 was by far the poorest tournament of the lot, and 2023 was won by a Springbok side recently transplanted to northern club teams, but forged in Super Rugby.) That fact, more than any, drives the envy of northern observers.

When the Blues bagged the title in 2023, they did it with a swing toward old-fashioned physicality. The coach, “Stern” Vern Cotter, favoured a forward-focused, no-nonsense approach. But there was still room in that incredible title charge for the kind of vision and flair that would warm the heart of Zinzan and his many admirers. The standout Super Rugby player of that title-winning 2023 season was the powerhouse No 8 Hoskins Sotutu – a brute of a runner with a bag of tricks that would have hung nicely on that same jersey three decades earlier.

The quality of rugby being played has improved elsewhere around the world since 1996 – both at national and domestic level. And as fans and observers of Super Rugby, we’ll often pick fault at the product: The TMO interference is a blight on the sport and New Zealand’s Super Rugby franchises have become disconnected from their live fanbases (a point shown most starkly by the crowds at Auckland FC and Warriors matches).

But as the pedal goes to the metal this weekend, Super Rugby is set to again demonstrate it is home to the best talent in this wonderful, perplexing and polarising sport.

That’s a Zinzan Brooke birthday treat we can all enjoy.