Its fucking criminal to have to shuffle your INSIDE CENTRE out for defense.
Over the last 15 years we've been somewhat pleased with our ability to achieve reasonable results at provincial and tier 2 (teams 5 through 10, roughly) test level by ignoring the realities of tier 1 test footy, and those realities are that defence is he most important thing and that kicking *(both varieties) is the second most important thing.
In what I assume is an attempt to ensure a sufficient level of 'entertainment', we've focused on how many 'playmakers' we need (the correct answer is zero) instead of how to ensure we quite simply score more points than the opposition.
This starts at the top, where the CEO publicly talks about 'smart, creative attractive running rugby' and the coach takes a year to (publicly, at least) acknowledge that test footy may just require a different approach to super rugby.
The result of all this is that a) we are still losing to the best, b) far from attracting new fans with the entertainment, even us die hards are tempted to switch off, and c) we are now losing to the provincial teams (see this year super rugby) and the tier 2 test sides.
I don't know if anyone caught the early 2000 bledisloe re runs on fox yesterday, but anz wasn't close to full because we were prioritizing "smart creative running rugby", it was close to full because we have a chance of actually fucking winning, and that's because the players, coaches and administration were focused solely on WINNING.
Getting fed up with this shit. Is it even worth 35 bucks a month to have fox sports HD anymore?
*Within this I've assumed that you are picking a front row that can scrummage and and second row that can jump.