The Rugby Championship is perceived as less prestigious than the World Cup and Bledisloe Cup.
New Zealand Rugby’s focus on the Greatest Rivalry Tour with South Africa diminishes its importance.
Winning the Championship is a tougher challenge, highlighting the All Blacks’ overall health and performance.
The Rugby Championship just can’t seem to get anyone to love it or even care who wins it. It’s almost as if it’s Prince Harry to the Bledisloe Cup’s Prince William – a spare trophy that only really becomes of interest or of value if the other isoff limits or locked away.
For the Southern Hemisphere rugby public – or maybe it’s just New Zealanders – to hold the Rugby Championship in relatively low regard seems weirdly dismissive and almost disdainful. Yet it’s not all that surprising.
Not surprising because the All Blacks have always been public about their trophy hierarchy, which they say (in order of importance) goes: World Cup, Bledisloe Cup, Rugby Championship.
While New Zealand Rugby has only intensified the demise of the Rugby Championship by effectively killing it next year and in 2030 to instead play the Greatest Rivalry Tour with South Africa.
The public can hardly be expected to care about the Rugby Championship when it’s been given such short shrift from players and administrators and sold more as an inconvenience than a top-tier tournament.
But while it is never going to be afforded the same prestige or depth of respect as the Bledisloe Cup, it has been and continues to be, a much better indicator by which to assess the overall health of the All Blacks.
All Blacks perform their haka before facing the world champion Springboks. Photo / SmartFrame
It’s surely patent that winning a six-game tournament featuring the world’s No 1 team as well as the world numbers 3, 6 and 7 is significantly harder than the All Blacks effectively managing to beat the Wallabies at home each year.
There seems no logical or credible way the achievement of winning the Rugby Championship could be deemed inferior to retaining the Bledisloe in the same way obtaining a PhD in nuclear physics can’t be seen in the same light as graduating with a degree in media studies.
The Wallabies are a much-improved team and the point of this comparison is to not degrade the achievement of beating them or cast Australia in an unflattering light, but to elevate in the public consciousness the difficulty of winning the Rugby Championship.
The Rugby Championship doesn’t have the same glitz and glamour as the Six Nations – it can’t match the depth of intensity each much generates in Europe where travelling fans create an entirely different atmosphere.
But if the raw logistics of each are fairly compared, the Rugby Championship comes out as the harder assignment. It’s six games played in nine weeks, as opposed to the Six Nations which is five played in seven.
The extra game typically means the Rugby Championship tests the depth of each country more than the Six Nations does, while the additional travel component in the Southern Hemisphere – there is no long-haul flying required in Europe – adds another level of squad management again.
The biggest difference, though, is that the Rugby Championship doesn’t come with any soft outs the way the Six Nations currently does.
Comparatively, the Six Nations houses Wales, who currently sit 12th in the rankings and have only won once since the 2023 World Cup, and Italy, who are ranked 10th.
The public perception and marketing spin about the Rugby Championship is madly out of whack, and as the last round approaches, there needs to be a serious rethink about what level of importance should be attached to the tournament and what it says about the All Blacks that they are in danger of not winning it again?
Since the introduction of Argentina in 2012 – which turned the Tri-Nations into the Rugby Championship – the All Blacks have won the title nine times, Australia once and South Africa twice (it wasn’t played in 2020).
Last season was the only time, however, that the All Blacks didn’t win in a non-World Cup year – the competition was truncated in 2015, 2019 and 2023 to accommodate the global tournament – and that served as a landmark of sorts as it fairly illustrated that a gap had opened between New Zealand and South Africa.
The All Blacks won just three of their six Rugby Championship tests last year – their lowest return in history – and while they could potentially win four this year, and be crowned champions if they win in Perth and South Africa lose in London, the probability of the Springboks retaining their title is greater.
A second season without winning the Rugby Championship would only intensify concerns that the All Blacks are tracking in the wrong direction and that the Bledisloe needs to be usurped as the best marker of New Zealand’s rugby health.
