Chris Hewett: Super Rugby’s survival is far from guaranteed

Remember the days when Super Rugby was so hot, you could toast yourself on it?

When the Blues of Auckland, the Crusaders of Christchurch and the Brumbies of Canberra were performing at such molten temperatures, the sackcloth-suited Europeans were left face down in the ashes?

How times have changed.

The southern hemisphere’s showpiece provincial tournament is now cooler than ever before, and not in a good way.

The South Africans have gone, the Melbourne Rebels have gone, Moana Pasifika are going and if a once brilliant outside-half from the New Zealand capital had his way, all five of his country’s franchises would now be considering their positions in the competition.

Should Super Rugby look to England and France for inspiration?

Lima Sopoaga, below, who won 16 silver-ferned caps before heading north for stints with Wasps, Lyon and the Japanese League One club Shimizu Blue Sharks, has been wondering if the Kiwis should turn inwards and restore their domestic championship to its former glory.

A certain Mr Farage might say he is arguing for “Blaxit”.

“Coming back and playing in the National Provincial Championship (with Waikato) was honestly one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had in my career,” he told a New Zealand radio station a few days ago.

“We don’t get the eyes to it because rugby’s so saturated, but maybe it’s time to look at that model and be similar to…England and France.

“You lose one more team and, all of a sudden, Super Rugby’s a 10-team competition.

“It’s kind of like ‘Well, why are we playing Super Rugby? Why don’t we have a domestic competition that’s the best in the world?’

“You have to start these conversations. The players would love a bit more stability and a bit less chaos and uncertainty, because every year Super Rugby seems to change – a new format or a new finals system.”

Stay at home and play among themselves

Back in the dim and distant, when Super Rugby was already losing its lustre, something of the kind was floated in this corner of the paper.

But for the Australians’ inability to build a domestic structure worthy of the name, we ventured to suggest, the New Zealanders and South Africans could save themselves a bag of money and reduce their carbon footprints by staying home and playing amongst themselves.

All that bristling Auckland-Wellington-Waikato hostility, heavily spiced by insurgencies from the Taranakis and Hawke’s Bays and North Harbours.

All those Canterbury-Otago-Tasman rivalries in the South Island…one way or another, the NPC had never found itself in need of additional ingredients from overseas.

Precisely the same could be said for the Currie Cup in the land of the Springboks.

Here was rugby heaven in its purest form.

A gift from the sporting gods

Indeed, we saw a glimpse of what was and might yet be again when the New Zealanders were forced by the pandemic to stage a purely domestic and wholly exhilarating “Aotearoa” competition, much of it played in sunshine rather than under floodlights, in front of unusually big audiences.

It was still a franchise affair rather than a provincial one, but in a dark and miserable time for the rugby community and just about everyone else, leaving aside those with a talent for naked profiteering, it was a gift from the sporting gods.

Six years on, what do we see?

Super Rugby in a sorrier state than at any point since its six-team inception 30-odd years ago, and the South Africans continuing, in their half-hearted way, to make a mess of the United Rugby Championship and, worse still, the “European Champions Cup”.

We could ask, for the umpteenth time, what the hell it is they’re bringing to the northern hemisphere club game, apart from broadcasting bucks, but let’s save our energy.

Which is more than the Sharks and the Stormers are doing, flying all the way up here for 80 minutes of thud and blunder before flying all the way home again.

The financial draw of travelling overseas

Sopoaga is bang on the money in several respects, not least in asserting that the Prem in England and the Top 14 in France have raced ahead of their rival competitions south of the Equator.

Financial muscle remains a mighty pull factor – as Mrs Merton might have asked a newly-arrived All Black or Springbok on her wickedly entertaining chat show: “What first attracted you to the slow, staid, one-dimensional, life-changingly lucrative rugby played up here in Europe?”

But it is not about the cash alone. Not any longer. It is also about crowds and culture and a different kind of competitiveness.

Put simply, the sense of southern hemisphere unity that underpinned the SANZAR Tri Nations era has fractured, probably beyond repair.

This was made clear, in the most graphic terms, when the New Zealanders and South Africans made a unilateral declaration of supremacy by announcing the restoration of what they modestly branded “the greatest rivalry” – a quadrennial multi-Test series between the two, supported by old-fashioned provincial tour matches.

Is this a business-savvy flight to quality in tough economic times or a ruthless shedding of excess baggage?

It feels like both, which is why Super Rugby’s survival is far from guaranteed.