Phil Gifford: Super Rugby needs to show us the stars

Blues winger Rieko Ioane in action, during the Super Rugby match between the Blues and the Chiefs, held at Eden Park, Auckland, New Zealand. Photo / Brett Phibbs.

And now, here we are again, with temperatures around the country hitting 30C, a full month left in our international cricket season, and apparently it's the right time for Super Rugby to start its 25th season.

The odd thing is that there are still occasions when the weary old competition lifts way above sweaty mediocrity.

It's true the division format can drive you nuts. It's true it's starting much too soon. When the first game of Super Rugby was played in '96, with the Blues beating the Hurricanes in Palmerston North, 36-28, the March 1 date seemed crazily early in the year. In 2020 March 1 falls during the fifth round of the competition. And it's true crowd figures may threaten new lows this year.

But oddly, amongst the dross, enough that's worthwhile seems to emerge every year to make total, jeering, nyah, nyah, derision about Super Rugby feel a bit shallow, predictable, and attention seeking.

Just when it seems the bottom of the barrel, such as expanding to 18 teams, or the hesitation polka around the availability of star All Blacks, has been scraped, something happens that is (in the immortal words of Charlie Hodge, one of Elvis Presley's Memphis Mafia, when the King recorded a decent rock song after years of maudlin ballads) "like finding a cheeseburger in a medicine chest".

When you think it's all over for the competition, a coach like Scott Robertson comes along, enthusiasm sparking like a Roman candle, everything about him the antithesis of jaded cynicism, producing a Crusaders team recalling the side's golden days in the late 90s and early 2000s. Auckland critics lead the charge in saying Super Rugby is flogging a dead horse that should have been buried for years. But after living back in Christchurch for the past nine months, I don't sense that contempt here.

This year at the Chiefs it's hard to not at least wonder what impact the return of Warren Gatland as coach, and Damian McKenzie as an inspirational player will have on the side. Gatland coached Waikato to an NPC title in 2006, and if the hometown hero can triumph with the Chiefs, I doubt they'll be bored in the Tron either.

I even can't help musing over whether the astonishing loyalty of the small band of Blues supporters, their faith only matched by long-suffering Warriors fans, might finally get some reward after years of crap. The Blues will have to do it the hard way. Beauden Barrett is a great international player, but even he, when he arrives in April, won't be able to work his magic if the Blues haven't already established some sort of base in the first 12 rounds. If they haul themselves into the playoffs it really will be one of the great comeback stories in New Zealand sport.

Crusaders head coach Scott Robertson celebrates. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

The real miracle, though, is that Super Rugby is still going at all, having always been the slightly weird child of a hasty, grasping, cold-eyed union between the game and cash, its loveless conception directed by Rupert Murdoch and his minions coming not out of affection for the game, but from an insatiable desire for more and more and more television content.

Mind you, at the start in 1996 players loved it. They were suddenly taking home pay cheques that 12 months earlier they could only have dreamed of. One built a deck bigger than the house he already had in an Auckland suburb. Another bought matching Ranger Rovers.

Fans took to it as well, especially in Auckland where the Auckland Blues, as they were first called, sprung off the base established by the best provincial team New Zealand has ever seen, a dynasty started in the 1980s by coach John Hart, and continued into the 90s by Maurice Trapp and Bryan Williams. The '96 Blues title-winning team, coached by Graham Henry, had 13 Auckland provincial players, 12 of them All Blacks, feeding Jonah Lomu on one wing, and another brilliant Counties-Manukau All Black, Joeli Vidiri, on the other.

What nobody liked to talk about was that it was all such a hasty construct. Peter Thorburn, previously an All Black selector, who had been given the role of Super 12 commissioner, was still fixing the nuts and bolts of the competition up to the opening whistle. Talking to him just days before kick-off, Thorburn, as honest as he is astute, told me "yeah, we'll be working out some things as we go along".

In the 24 years since there's never been a sense of a masterplan. You see it everywhere.

The Hurricanes run on to the field at Levin Domain for their pre-season game with the Crusaders in front of a record crowd. Photo / Darryl Butler.

Visible leadership? I doubt any but the most anal of rugby tragics could even get near to being able to name the CEO of Sanzar, which runs Super Rugby, and where the headquarters of Sanzar is based. (For the record the CEO is a South African called Andy Marinos, who used to play league in England, and the head office is in Bondi Junction in Sydney.)

A clear, obvious pathway? It started as Super 12, bloated its way up to Super 18, and is now slimming down again, with 15 teams this year, and just 14 next year. It would have been a hell of a lot better to stick with 12 teams, but Super footy has often proved the old joke that a giraffe is a horse designed by a committee.

In New Zealand things really did fracture in 2007, when 24, count them, 24, of the best All Blacks were kept out of the first two months of Super Rugby to allow them to rehabilitate, and get fitter than they ever had been before to go to the World Cup at the end of the year.

Two things happened. One was that some of the players, as Don Tricker said in the official report after the '07 Cup quarter-final exit, "lost some confidence" as injuries started to stack up when the gym bunnies were thrown into contact against match-hardened players.

Just as devastating was that viewing figures on Sky television plummeted a disastrous 29 per cent. In the key area of males aged 25 to 54 years, viewing figures for the top 10 games dropped from 101,700 in 2006, to 68,800 in 2007. The number of fans lost has never been fully won back.

It may never happen, but in the spirit of '96, and working things out as you go along, one easy incentive for more Kiwi fans to watch would surely be if New Zealand Rugby directed that the only games the All Blacks have to be stood down from were matches being played overseas.

Super Rugby started out feeling as much like show business as sport. And in show biz the fans want to see the stars. We were the ones who leg roped the All Blacks in super rugby. We could at the least save our best for our local crowds.