Its not just ex-pats.
Friday the Crusaders v Chiefs game was one of the best games of rugby at any level I've ever seen:
I was moved to suggest to others that if league viewers stumbled across that game and knew nothing of rugby they could have been converted instantly.
As few dropped passes etc as you would see in league, clear contests for possession and no real problems with the "dark arts" of scrummaging and breakdown play.
Its a pity when your weekend peaks at 7:20pm on Friday.
I completely agree. I have said before that if the 'product quality' of our Super teams was at or close to that of NZ's our problems would be dramatically fewer than they are.
That's why I become frustrated with discussions here that often to tend to heavily focus on what one might term 'macro' or 'structural' factors like: just less teams, change which States, new domestic competitions, and such like.
Absolutely, these factors all play their role but IMO the central problem we have is that the quality of our Super teams' rugby is, at best, uplifted a la recently the Reds and Tahs in 2011 and 2014, maybe just once every decade, and at worst is what we see today in all our Super teams: poor standards, few wins, and generally uninspiring teams as teams.
Whilst NZ's ever-increasing excellence is making these issues of our base quality appear even worse.
Essentially, our rugby product quality has deteriorated to a kind of tipping point and, mostly, the many intrinsic positive attributes of Union played well are being buried beneath a mountain of ordinariness.
Thinking that just 'play more levels, play more often' will fix the core quality and skills problem (kind of the NRC idea) at pro level is IMO understandably comforting but it's illusory and there's little hard evidence to support that notion.
Australian pro rugby in the last decade has only ever broken through to success when seasoned new and superior HCs have aligned with the right player base at the right time. And then these HCs have quickly departed and their respective teams soon fell back to the mean, or worse. Coaching excellence has been the key though.
In my view, and given very scarce rugby financial and skill development resources in this country, the only way to fix this problem will be to somehow shrink back to a platform of teams and players that is small and tight enough so that a high density of curative coaching and skills development resources (of a superior kind) can be brought to bear quickly enough (to avert a full pro rugby code collapse) so's to produce a superior pro rugby product in at least a carefully selected number of core markets.
My point being that we simply don't have the quantity and depth enough for a high enough level of essential curative resources in relation to the total quantity of teams and players we have today.
We cannot afford this relative gap any longer. And we likely cannot financially afford a fast enough, large enough expansion of the curative resources all over the place to match up with the volume of teams and on paper pro players we have today. So the essential curative resources and the size of what they are charged to fix must be radically re-balanced or alternatively we will die a code death driven by 'too much quantity and far too little quality to match it' which is actually what is occurring today.