Blues team huddle during the Super Rugby match between DHL Stormers and Blues at DHL Newlands on February 29, 2020 in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo / Getty Images.
Blues team huddle during the Super Rugby match between DHL Stormers and Blues at DHL Newlands on February 29, 2020 in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo / Getty Images.
OPINION:
Sorry South Africa, as important as you and your money once were to Super Rugby, the competition's future without you is far more exciting.
It happened as an unintended consequence and the world is now littered with them. As devastating to life and money as the global Covid strangleholdhas been and will continue to be, the pandemic has had its bright spots.
The shiniest of them all has been the turmoil that southern hemisphere rugby finds itself in. Not because of the financial and scheduling waking nightmare that taunts administrators, but the hastened demise of a competition that is as lovable as a no-mask cough.
Now the South Africans have for all intents and purposes cut themselves adrift from Super Rugby, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Not an oncoming train either as some would have you believe, but daylight. Daylight that will turn the vampire of Super Rugby to dust.
This ghoulish apparition has been slowly sucking the life force from our national game, leaving a once=vibrant and enthusiastic figure a soulless corporate version of what it once was.
Despite the protestations of the fiscal puppeteers, constantly toying with us with the promise of a game with global weight and reach, no one wanted the engorged spectre of a competition. No one has for years.
General view during the Blues v Chiefs Super Rugby match at Eden Park, Auckland, New Zealand. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
The once-lithe and dexterous comp, the toast of newfound rugby professionalism, has long since lost its vitality. From a fit and nimble minimalist figure, we now have a bloated and distended corpse. In an attempt to provide the public with foie gras, the goose has gorged itself to a timely demise. Too big, too unstructured, too expensive. Ultimately collapsing under its own weight, but with a huge blow from Covid-19, which has essentially euthanised a terminally ill beast.
Get up in the middle of the night? Not anymore. Unravel the mysteries of conference systems? Who could really be bothered? Watch our very best being relentlessly pummeled with untenable travel schedules? I can't be party to that anymore. Watch teams ripped apart with compulsory rest and rotation so the national side has half a chance of not expiring mid season? We've always hated that. Listen to the constant virtual signalling around player welfare as they wring every last drop out of our finest athletes? No, no, no.
South Africa have called New Zealand Rugby complicit in the destruction of Super Rugby as they dared to look after their best interests with the development of Super Rugby Aotearoa. So be it.
To me it is irrelevant. The blame game means nothing. All parties have had their fingerprints smeared all over the victim. It doesn't matter who aided and abetted this killing, we just know it's dead.
Bury it, cremate it or feed it to the hounds.
Now, free from the tyranny of greed, our game will be forced to reincarnate, to rediscover its pneuma, to be reborn.
Let's not mourn the falling of a once-great competition, let's revel in what the future can bring.
