Super Rugby has sucked the life and passion out of our game

Well, that’s all right then. The Wallabies’ victory over Argentina doesn’t mean that all the problems of Australian rugby are solved – the continuing prohibition against aerial culling of private school old boys prevents that – but it’s a good start. We can safely say that Australia is closer to having 23 men who can play rugby union than it has been for years.

So let us turn our gaze to matters more domestic. Michael Cheika, erstwhile coach of Australia, the Waratahs, the Pumas and I think some other ones too, has spoken to The Roar Rugby Podcast on the issue of Super Rugby, and specifically his belief that Australia would be well served by getting out of it and setting up our own local Oz-only competition.

It’s worth considering. After all, Australian Super Rugby teams have been struggling for years, the sad performances of the Wallabies matching them, and as they say the definition of insanity is…well, being an Australian rugby coach. But nevertheless, maybe Cheika has a point?

Or maybe he doesn’t. The problem with cutting ourselves loose from Super Rugby is, of course, that it would lessen the amount of top quality competition that Australian players are exposed to, thus making it even harder to build a competitive national side.

But we have to consider two points: 1. maybe building a competitive national side shouldn’t be the primary purpose of our domestic competition; and 2. it hasn’t been working anyway. I mean, maybe you haven’t noticed, but the Wallabies, our newfound devastating dominance over Argentina notwithstanding, have been sliding down snakes on the world’s game board for some time, with ladders terrifyingly difficult to land on. And all that has been happening while the players who make up the Wallabies have been plying their trade in Super Rugby’s “elite” atmosphere.

It could be that the two points above work together in a somewhat paradoxical way: that is, that making the national side stronger isn’t dependent on trying to construct the domestic game in a way specifically designed to make the national side stronger; but that rather if Rugby Australia can build a domestic structure that makes rugby overall more interesting, more popular and more likely to be taken up by youngsters, we could end up getting a stronger national team at the end of it.

Or maybe we won’t. But for a really passionate rugby fan, would you rather have an all-conquering Wallaby team in a country where hardly anybody cares, or a national side that rarely challenges the top nations but a huge upswing in grassroots participation and public enthusiasm for the sport? Would you rather have tough, battle-hardened players coming out of a competition that nobody in this country watches, and in which a great portion of the games don’t even involve this country’s teams, or slightly softer players being cheered on by passionate fans as they hammer each other in tribal turf wars each week?

Or would you care for neither, as we have now?

The point is, in my humble – seriously, VERY humble – opinion, change is needed. What that change should be is hard to say, and I need to acknowledge here that a lot of people who have a much greater understanding of the rugby landscape both nationally and internationally, and much more experience in the field, have not come up with anything that works yet.

But I must admit that, as a fan of both the NRL and AFL, I would love to see something in rugby union that could even approach the success of those competitions. I’d love to see an Australian national rugby competition that felt like it had meaning, that felt like it left a real mark on the sporting calendar, and most importantly, felt like people CARED about it.

Let’s be honest: that ain’t Super Rugby. Even if the fact of New Zealand’s dominance of the comp were left aside, the season is too short, and the Australian teams too lacking in either public profile or fanbase, to be any sort of counterpart to the bigger codes. And that’s because the Australian Super Rugby franchises exist to provide personnel to the Wallabies, not to fire the imagination of fans in their own right.

How to fire those imaginations is the difficult question, and it is indeed unfortunate that the answer to that question will, one way or another, depend on massive amounts of money being pumped in from…

No, I don’t know either. But in a sport famous for its elitism and associations with the top end of town, surely the money is out there. Isn’t it? Are you telling me that not a single employee of Rugby Australia has incriminating photos of a single billionaire that they can use to twist the funds for a new national competition out of them? Come on. There has to be a way.

It’s important that there be a huge stack of cash involved, because if and when a national competition gets up and running – again – it’s going to be unloved and little-watched. That’s the key: organisers of a new domestic comp need to be prepared to come off a very low base and play a very long game. If the competition is founded on the basis that it must achieve sellout crowds or financial self-sufficiency in the first few years, then let’s not bother, eh? This thing has got to be BUILT, and like any great building project, that means beginning with a glittering edifice in our minds and the fortitude to keep coming back to look at a pile of wood and bricks for a long time without losing heart.

It may be that, even if we have a top-notch national competition with big viewing numbers and great sponsors, it’s never able to match the cash on offer from big overseas clubs, and that the best players keep on leaving Australia in ever-greater numbers. Maybe in the end the new competition will be a feeder for players to other, bigger competitions, rather than the Wallabies, and the Wallabies will either have to bite the bullet and pick their teams from around the world, or accept permanent mediocrity. Which would be a bit of a shame.

LISTEN TO THE MICHAEL CHEIKA PODCAST IN THE PLAYER BELOW OR FOLLON ON YOUR PODCAST PLAYER OF CHOICE

But then, it kind of feels like that’s going to happen anyway, doesn’t it? We might as well try to make our game at home suck a bit less while we’re at it. You can say all you like that the standard of rugby will fall if we go it alone and stop playing against Kiwi teams, but there’s standards and there’s standards. One standard you can go by is the standard of how many people are watching rugby, and how many people are playing rugby, and how many people are talking about rugby. It seems to be it might be worth trying to make those numbers going up by trying to build up a bit of tribal passion over here.

What kind of competition should it be? Who knows? Maybe a team in each capital city, with one or two extra in Queensland and New South Wales? Maybe the top existing clubs get an upgrade into a bigger, more professional league? Maybe the existing Super teams take their place, add Melbourne back in, throw in Adelaide and some country sides, and the top two, or four, play off against the top two NZ teams each year, so the international facet isn’t lost completely? Maybe pull in club teams from around the world for a championship after each season?

Whatever the structure, the season should be longer – comparable to the AFL and NRL (not as long as the NRL though, they really do push it) – and there should be enough teams that that can be achieved without everyone having to play each other four or five times.

Most of all, the teams that make it up need to have an identity: something to rally around and believe in. The current Super Rugby franchises give the impression of having taken old provincial identities and sucked all the life out of them. Building identities from scratch – or from the tiny buds of existing fandoms – will be hard. It’ll take time, work and resources. But if it’s what we want…

Of course we don’t have to do any of this. We can just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s not like Michael Cheika’s never been wrong before.