Super Rugby: What icebergs?

You can tell I’m an old bloke. I still vividly remember the Leyland P-76 car launch, which was the very definition of a lemon. Ugly as. mechanically unreliable, poorly put together. Luckily I didn’t buy one; at that stage I could only afford a second hand VW beetle. The P-76 was a disaster that was the downfall of Leyland in Australia.

2016 was the year Super Rugby launched its very own P-76: The four conference 18 team expansion. With four conferences in two groups, with different finals guarantees to each group and conference and teams in conferences where they have to play the majority of their games many thousands of miles from home across multiple timezones. This model was very P-76-like; ugly, unreliable and fitted together very poorly.

In principle, it should have been a ripper! The introduction of an Argentinian and a Japanese team to the competition added new interest and broadened the coverage. It was a preliminary expansion to the next big thing in 2020 which is to bring the America’s teams into the fold. It could have been done simply and easily as I laid out in my article published here on April 27. Instead the South Africans, who have always believed that the dice are loaded against them, conspired to “fix” the inequities by inventing a four-conference system that guaranteed them two home finals and an away final out of the eight spots available.

The problem with the competition this year is that the quality of the teams is very uneven. So there are lots of “easy” matches. I rate any game played by the Force, Sunwolves, Cheetahs, Kings, Bulls, Reds, Rebels and Jaguares as easy. But the “easy” matches are not evenly distributed. The NZ conference has no easy teams, Australia three and the two SA conferences have the other five. There are ten teams I would classify as “hard” – Blues, Chiefs, Hurricanes, Crusaders, Highlanders, Waratahs, Brumbies, Stormers, Sharks and Lions.

Now that’s arbitrary, but is based on answering the question “How hard did the best teams have to work to beat them?” To have a look at the number of hard games played shows how one team has had a clear advantage over all the others: 10 hard games: Blues, Chiefs, Hurricanes, Crusaders, Highlanders. 8 hard games: Waratahs, Brumbies, Sharks, Lions. 4 hard games: Stormers – that’s right, just four hard games all season. All the rest were against easy teams. They should be leading the table by miles.

Then if you crunch the results to see which teams were able to win against the “hard” teams some interesting trends begin to appear. You’d say away wins would count for more than home wins if teams are equal and then bonus points.

The Hard-game table:

1. The Highlanders: They are the best team so far because they have won seven games against the hard teams, five at home and two away.
2. The Hurricanes: Six hard-team wins; two at home and four away.
3. The Crusaders: Also six hard-team wins; two at home and four away. Down to third because the Hurricanes scored more bonus points.
4. The Chiefs: Six hard-team wins; three at home and three away.
5. The Lions: The first non-NZ team. Five hard-team wins; three at home and two away.
6. The Blues: Surprised? I was. They’ve got four hard-team wins; all four at home at Fortress Eden Park.
7. The Sharks: Another surprise. They’ve got three hard-team wins; one at home and two away.
8. The Brumbies: Three hard-team wins; two at home, one away . But the last win against a hard team was in round 8, three months ago!
9. The Waratahs: Two wins; one at home and one away. The coulda-beens. Only played two whole games really well. Didn’t make the finals.
10. The Stormers: One win against a hard team and that was at home. Lost their other three hard games and do not deserve to even be in the finals, let alone get a home quarter final.

Given that the NZ teams are always the strongest, one conference (SA1 this year and SA2 next year) will always have an easy run to the finals. It is a measure of just how badly the Bulls have played that they are not in the finals, despite being in the weakest group.

There’s an easy fix to this problem of bias. Run three conferences of six teams each. The Sunwolves join the NZ conference and the Jaguares join the Australian conference to provide a measure of balance. There are then two alternatives:

1. Play 5 teams in each conference. The fairest layout but there’s an extra week’s inter-conference travel involved.
2. Play 4 teams in each inter-conference and 7 teams intra-conference. Same travel requirements as currently exist, but less fair and too many home derbies.

Then there are three guaranteed quarter finals to the conference winners and five wild card spots based on final table position. All subsequent finals based on points in the table. Once the quarter finals are over, home games go to the team with the highest table points.

Given how unfair the current system is, there were last week some noises about changes next year coming out of leaked discussions in NZ. The changes proposed were changes only to the finals make-up, with only the group winners (SA and Australasia) getting home finals and all other places determined by positions on the table. A bit fairer, but not by much. Nothing to address the balance of the conferences.

But the South Africans are having none of it. The CEO of SANZAAR Andy Marinos has come out with an immediate statement, putting down the rebellion. He said that there will be no changes next year. His justification is that ” A tournament’s qualification criteria cannot be determined on one year’s results in isolation.” Blind Freddie could tell him that it will be exactly the same next year, but for SANZAAR its full speed ahead; icebergs are a left wing media conspiracy.

Why does it matter? Because in a sporting code where you want to prosper long term (excluding such non-sports as WWF and professional Boxing) you cannot allow a contest where one or more teams has an inbuilt advantage over all the others. It is a recipe for lingering resentment and disillusionment which will lead to complete fan disengagement. And in a country where there is already widespread fan disengagement from Rugby, this is the last thing we want.

For the sake of Super Rugby. I want the four NZ teams to succeed next weekend and they probably will. But three of their teams will be at a marked disadvantage because of the travel, and they certainly don’t all deserve it.