A Blues huddle during a preseason Super Rugby Pacific clash against the Hurricanes. Photo / Photosport
A Blues huddle during a preseason Super Rugby Pacific clash against the Hurricanes. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
Super Rugby kicks off this weekend, or probably will, and never has the sense of anticipation been less.
Even when the competition was full of junk teams and shorn of sabbatical-taking All Blacks there was always still some lingering hope the whole thing would somehow ignite and produce afew tales of the unexpected.
But alas, what was once the greatest oval ball show on the planet – a fast and furious, all-glamour adventure to the Southern Hemisphere's most iconic rugby citadels has been reduced, for the next month, to a handful of teams kicking a ball about in the local park behind the Four Square in Queenstown.
The last bit is no one's fault and is in fact the result of innovative thinking to keep the competition alive by taking it out of Covid's likely hotspots.
But that hasn't stopped the impression from forming that after a decade of self-inflicted damage caused by wildly ambitious expansion plans and three years of pandemic carnage, Super Rugby is the punch-drunk, veteran boxer being forced into the ring to keep collecting a paycheck.
New Zealand Rugby has virtually said as much, confirming that the en masse shift to Central Otago is primarily about giving host broadcaster Sky TV the content it has paid for to avoid yet another year of significant financial impairment.
Presumably NZR's obligation is to simply deliver the games without any requirement to spruce up the aesthetics or sense of occasion.
Sir Michael Jones with Moana Pasifika head coach Aaron Mauger. Photo / Photosport
Queenstown is reportedly going to be closed by Friday and so it is unlikely there will even be the permissible one man and his dog on the sideline, while we could yet see front-rowers being asked to play against the team that pays their wages.
But for the next month, the mindset is that the show must go on. Pick up the dog shit and the stray booze cans chucked by the underage drinkers and get 30 players – any 30 players who have produced a negative RAT test – out there.
That's all that matters because decamping to Queenstown is an exercise in buying time as much as it is about preserving income.
To gain its full broadcast fee, NZR have to deliver not just the New Zealand component of Super Rugby but the transtasman element, too.
If too many games are cancelled in the next few weeks, there won't be any time left to ram them in later, so NZR are gambling that they can smash through their domestic fixtures from the relative security of their Queenstown bio-bubble, by which time, the Omicron wave may have peaked.
NZR would also appear to be working on the premise that if Omicron case numbers do indeed peak later next month as forecast, it will pave the way for the Government to potentially fast-track its border settings or at least entertain the notion that Australia's Super Rugby teams can come to New Zealand under soft quarantine regulations where they enter 48 hours before game day, live in a bubble and then depart the day after they play.
If there is no change to the proposed border security timelines or the New Zealand Government won't grant any kind of dispensation to avoid seven-day isolation requirements, then the Kiwi sides are going to have to bunk down in Australia for a couple of months to demand their full swag from Sky.
To be fair to NZR, what else can they do? They came up with a Super Rugby Pacific format that everyone loved and through circumstances beyond their control they can no longer deliver as intended.
But for all their tenacity to keep the competition alive, they know, as does everyone else, that it will take a miracle for this to not be yet another year in which Super Rugby endures prolific brand damage.
The drama won't be built around who is going to win on any given weekend, but instead, who is going to be able to play on any given weekend.
Uncertainty will be rife, which is normally what every sporting competition craves, but in this case, the great unknown is what happens after the New Zealand sides have played each other?
And how much of this competition is going to be played behind closed doors denying the next generation of rugby hopefuls from getting close to their heroes and having that little fire lit inside them to want to one day themselves be part of Super Rugby?
With a bit of luck and massive sacrifice on the part of the players, it is possible that Super Rugby will find a way to collect its full broadcast income and claim a triumph for resilience in the face of adversity.
But for Joe Public, there is no pot of gold if they stick with it for the season and anyone on a money out ticket rather than money in, will have to find the most extraordinary reserves of determination to get through Super Rugby in 2022.
