There’s a growing body of evidence that rugby is dying as a participation sport, but just as much data is emerging to say it is alive and well as an entertainment product.
Super Rugby Pacific played out like a Tarantino film over the weekend - big characters, explosive scenesand a plot that was scarcely believable yet never lacked credibility.
Who, honestly, could have watched the Crusaders lose to the Waratahs 43-40 in extra time and feel like rugby had no future as a broadcast sport?
What more could anyone have wanted? The Crusaders were within two seconds of avenging their round-two loss to the Waratahs - could Rivez Reihana have not bothered with the conversion and simply run the clock down to kill the game? - but somehow managed to lose.
Both the loss and the nature of the loss were spiced by the backstory that Crusaders coach Rob Penney wasn’t so long ago sacked by the Waratahs, and here he is now in charge of the defending champions, who have just one win from their first seven games.
There wasn’t anything missing from the contest in Melbourne either, where the Rebels played like they knew they were auditioning to persuade a consortium of investors to save them from closure to see off a Highlanders team that may not know how to win, but do at least have a handle on how to lose with a bit of style.
And then there was the heavyweight encounter in Wellington between the Hurricanes and Chiefs, which produced 80 riveting minutes that showed New Zealand has an emerging generation of seriously good, dynamic, explosive forwards who look like they may be able to hold their own against the sorts of bruisers they will encounter when they inevitably win test caps.
If the games in Sydney and Melbourne, which both yielded more than 80 points, are open to accusations of being pyjama rugby - all tonic and no gin - the clash in the capital produced the sort of set-piece crunch and collision warfare that suggests Super Rugby Pacific has an entertainment range in excess of other club competitions.
Tyrel Lomax has been tracking towards being New Zealand’s new Carl Hayman for a few years now, but the big surprise on Saturday night was how readily and effectively the Hurricanes demolished the Chiefs’ scrum.
Perhaps a bigger surprise, still, is how the table-topping Hurricanes have embraced the importance of set-piece power and collision dominance as part of their pass-and-catch game plan.
Lomax’s front-row chums Xavier Numia and Asafo Aumua were quite brilliant against the Chiefs and are respectively, by the veritable country mile, the two in-form players in their respective positions.
The Hurricanes scrum was in charge against the Chiefs. Photo / Photosport
Aumua has taken a meandering route to the summit, but whether it’s the additional responsibility of captaincy, the arrival of a new head coach in Clark Laidlaw or the sting of missing selection of last year’s World Cup, he’s come into 2024 a different player.
He’s seemingly in that virtuous cycle where the more tackles he busts in open play, the more confidence it gives him in the scrum and the more accuracy he derives in his lineout throwing.
And ‘round and ‘round it goes, to the point where he dominated his Chiefs opposite Samisoni Taukei’aho and played with such impact, it was impossible not to wonder what he might bring to the All Blacks in this kind of form.
Numia has similarly taken a little time to unleash his full potential, but certainly the Chiefs felt the full force of his destructive power, which buckled their scrum and left them unable to get any kind of foothold with regard to territory or possession.
The Hurricanes front row operated as the anaesthetic, allowing the back row, or Peter Lakai and Brayden Iose specifically, to do the surgery, cutting the Chiefs open multiple times to rearrange their defensive anatomy in all sorts of different ways.
There was something for everyone in Super Rugby over the weekend - the casual fan, the purist and the All Blacks coaching panel.
A weekend that delivered epic contests, drama, spectacle, two Australian battlers holding on for wins against New Zealand sides and an emerging cohort of young Hurricanes forwards proving their readiness for test football serves as reason for mindsets about Super Rugby Pacific to change.
It is a competition dogged by this relentlessly negative narrative, one that seems to be more a default mechanism than based on actual events.
The critics are conditioned to find fault because for so long there was fault to find - but maybe now those commentators who continue to make binary comparisons between Super Rugby and the NRL need to tone down this idea that the former continually gets everything wrong, and the latter everything right.
Super Rugby is still prone to lapses - not getting its Easter weekend scheduling right and overdoing the evening kickoffs - but its law-tinkering and empowerment of match officials to take control, combined with a mini-resurgence in Australia and the growth of the two Pacific-sides, means that most weekends, the competition delivers product that has a compatible entertainment value with the NRL and other football codes.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
