Braveheart81
In 2014 the Waratahs dominated the Super Rugby competition and were both the best attacking and defensive team. They won their last 7 regular season games to win the minor premiership and by the time they faced the Crusaders in the final their winning streak was at 8.
New South Wales, being the erudite state that it is, knew that one day people would be questioning who was the greatest Australian Super Rugby champion of them all so the only way to set up a fair comparison was to also face the Crusaders in the final. To make their impending fairy tale victory even sweeter, the Tahs were matching up against the side that had beaten them the other two times they’d played a Super Rugby final. The stage was set for a great team to be immortalised as Australian rugby’s finest.
Now let’s not take anything away from the Brumbies of 2004. They were a brilliant team. Chock full of 1999 Rugby World Cup winning Wallabies plus even more RWC finalists from 2003. They had a backline that could have lit up the darkest night. Unfortunately for them however, they never really got a chance to prove how good they actually were because the Crusaders team got stuck in traffic and missed the first 20 minutes of the match. This game was over before half time yet the Brumbies still almost managed to choke. They did enough to be Super Rugby champions, but hardly can lay claim to being the greatest of the Aussie champions.
The Reds in 2011 were sensational. Who can forget the Genia and Cooper show? They were in the form of their lives and set the competition alight from start to finish. Oh, apart from getting absolutely thumped by the Waratahs in the second round. 2011 was a Rugby World Cup year and plenty of key All Blacks and Springboks were rested throughout the competition. Now the Reds were certainly the best team and proved that in the final, but had the key opposition not been resting players through the season, the Reds probably wouldn’t have hosted the final and hence would have been unlikely to win.
Onto 2014. Now every year the Waratahs get trumped up as the team to beat. So great is the expectation in Australia’s premier state that it can be hard for the team to live up to the hype. Not for this champion team however. 13 Wallabies started the final for the Tahs with another three on the bench. They even had a Springbok in their ranks to add an extra bit of class. The 2014 Waratahs became equally well known for their physicality and rock solid defence as their exciting attack full of offloads, brilliant support play and spectacular tries. The fact that they broke just about every Super Rugby record in 2014 only confirms how great this side was. Playing in front of the biggest Super Rugby crowd ever, the Waratahs orchestrated a final that will be remembered forever. Brilliant play from both sides saw the game see-saw back and forth. Which team was going to produce something brilliant when it counted and clinch the game? The script couldn’t have been written better. Down by two points in the final minutes, the Waratahs were having their final crack. Richie McCaw’s cloak of invisibility finally fell away and he was penalised at the breakdown. The Ice Man, Bernard Foley had been kicking brilliantly all night but this one was right on his limit. Cool as a cucumber, he steps up and strikes it beautifully and the crowd holds their breath as one. Over it goes, the Tahs win by a point and the crowd goes wild. The greatest Super Rugby champions in the greatest Super Rugby final we’ve seen. What a moment and what a team.
