Super Rugby Pacific is one area in which the game in New Zealand can win ground the old fashioned way: by providing exciting rugby.
Don’t organise the street parties but there are glimmers of light this season that may not be an express train coming down the tunnel.
Best of the Blues: Selecting the best Super Rugby XV of all time
Thinking as one
Because one call can cost a game, coaches are often at odds with referees. But there’s good reason to believe a desire to have Super games flow and to see more tries is now common ground for coaches and refs.
Look for television match officials this year to volunteer an opinion only when they believe there has been a yellow or red card offence that hasn’t been picked up by the ref, or his two assistants on the field.
The expectation for 2024 is that Super coaches will suck up the occasional refereeing error in return for a more entertaining game not plagued with nit-picking stoppages.
The Blues must perform
Hopefully new Blues coach Vern Cotter is the right man to build on the team’s revival under Leon MacDonald. For Super Rugby to thrive, it needs to be strong in our biggest city, and the Blues playing winning footy is an essential element.
Cotter is a phlegmatic former farmer who kick-started his coaching career by brilliantly winning the Ranfurly Shield with Bay of Plenty in 2004. When his charges needed a break then, he’d run them out to his farm for a bit of docking, which not only took their minds off rugby, but reminded them of what life outside the game was about. Sheep sheds wouldn’t have played much of a role since then, as he coached Clermont to titles in France, and then Scotland for three seasons in the Six Nations.
Auckland sporting audiences are the most discerning in New Zealand, but when a team is humming, they’ll turn out. Just ask the Warriors.
Please go easy on the ads
The buzz around the Black Caps is not just built on the amazing play of Kane Williamson, whose skill and courage is matched by his modesty.
It also helps that anyone with a television set can watch him and the team perform without having to pay.
Televising games has always been at the heart of Super Rugby. Providing TV content was the reason the competition was hastily invented in 1996.
While it’s not remotely as encompassing as TVNZ’s coverage of cricket, there’s a small ray of light in the fact every Saturday night for 19 rounds, there will be a Super game on the free-to-air Sky Open channel.
There will be ads, but the games will start live, and in the tough world of attracting a sports audience, every extra set of eyes matters.
Keep those hammers going
Having previously lived in Christchurch through many of the glory years of the Crusaders, it remains grimly fascinating to me that for 13 seasons, the team most often the best in New Zealand has played in the worst stadium.
The delay in not starting a new stadium for the city after the 2011 earthquake until 2022 has been disgraceful. But given that whether it’s Auckland railway tracks or inter-island ferries, we seem to have all the Germanic infrastructure abilities of engineering Mr Beans, it’s a small comfort to know that in Christchurch, there are no signs of delay in the building of the new Te Kaha Stadium.
With the “temporary” stadium at Addington about to be the Crusaders’ home ground for the 13th season, completion of Te Kaha in 2026 can’t come soon enough.
