Gregor Paul: Australia's Super Rugby false dawn

Rebels assistant coach Joe Barakat speaks to the players during a Melbourne Rebels Super Rugby training session. Photo / Getty Images.

It appears as if Australia may be in the midst of a Super Rugby renaissance. This time last year they had five teams in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the pile, now the Rebels lead the competition and collectively they have nine victories compared with the paltry five they had amassed by the end of March in 2017.

The decision to axe the Force at the end of last year has, in these opening weeks, been justified. Australia tore itself apart pulling out of Perth.

Rugby was lucky to survive in any shape or form in any part of the country after such a botched process led to what many felt was the wrong outcome.

But six months on and some of that ill-feeling has dissipated as sacrificing the Force may have been disastrous for Western Australia but it has served the greater good of rugby in Australia.

It isn't really a surprise that the Rebels have led Australia's recovery.

They were truly awful last year. After five games they had one bonus point. They finished their campaign with one win, one draw and nine points and here they are now, top of the table with 20 points and four victories.

Their rise appears to be Lazarus-like, which it is, but there is a simple explanation for it: the Force were effectively moulded into the Rebels as a going concern. Most notably the Melbourne club picked up Adam Coleman, the Haylett-Petty brothers Dane and Ross and maybe most importantly, the astute coaching brain of Dave Wessels.

Two relatively weak clubs have been merged to create a stronger single entity and it's no surprise that the Australian Rugby Union, for now at least, have been convinced that four Super Rugby teams is the optimal number for them.

While the Rebels have been the primary beneficiary of the Force's demise, the other three Australian clubs have welcomed the less competitive player market now that a thin base doesn't have to be stretched so far.

The Reds, total basket case in 2017, have won three times so far in 2018 providing further evidence that the gloom is lifting.

But the analogy here is that Australia's teams have made it safely out of the calm waters to be found in the harbour and we don't yet know if they are truly sea worthy craft until they have been exposed to rougher seas.

That is, they haven't yet played any New Zealand teams, all of whom spent 2016 and 2017 ripping giant holes in the hulls of all five Australian sides.

Famously, Australian sides didn't win a single game against any from New Zealand last year, after only managing to do it three times in 2016.

In two years of Super Rugby, Australia had a six per cent win ratio against New Zealand teams and whatever level of optimism has surfaced in the last few weeks, it should be held in check until late Friday night when the Rebels face the Hurricanes.

This will be the first trans-Tasman encounter of the year and the first opportunity to put the current standings into a better context.

There's no point in the Australians heralding a new dawn until they have measured their status against the benchmark-setting New Zealanders.

The Rebels are flying high, but their four wins have come against the Sunwolves, Reds, Brumbies and Sharks and three of those were at home.

The Hurricanes are a vastly different proposition to anything the Rebels have yet encountered and while this competition desperately needs for the Australian renaissance to be real, it may, in the next six weeks, be exposed as an illusion.

The Rebels have improved, but probably nowhere near enough to beat the best New Zealand teams.

That gap still looks sizeable and it will be a fall off your seat moment if the Rebels win this weekend.

A fall off your seat moment if they beat any Kiwi team other than the Blues and it's the same with the Reds: they are better, but that's from such a low benchmark and they can't yet be seen as a serious threat. Not to regularly beat the New Zealand sides anyway.

Once again, based on what has been on view so far, the New Zealand sides - Blues excluded - are playing with an unrivalled pace, intensity and skill level.

They still look like they will be too good for the Australians, to the extent that while it's unimaginable New Zealand could post a second consecutive clean sweep of Australian teams, it's well within the realms of possibility that they will get alarmingly close.

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