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A couple of weeks ago, the Queensland Rugby Union announced that their Super Rugby players were back in training for the 2014 season. The other Australian Super rugby franchises are also in training.
For me this is rugby madness. The players shouldn’t be training for next year, they should be playing out this season in some sort of national competition.
If long and intense training for rugby was the secret of success on the field, Japanese sides would be unbeatable. These teams train for long periods and play few games in comparison with the off-the-field work they put themselves through.
South African rugby has its fabled Currie Cup competition which is nearing its climax with many Springboks, including the captain Jean de Villiers, being co-opted into teams who fancy their chances of winning the tournament.
In New Zealand, there is the ITM provincial tournament which is divided into two conferences. These play among themselves with promotion and relegation rewarding or punishing the teams that succeed or fail.
All the teams in these conferences, too, are eligible for a shot at capturing the Ranfurly Shield, a trophy that is over 100 years old and is a sort of New Zealand rugby equivalent of the FA Cup.
The point about this is that while the top Australian rugby players are training, their South African and New Zealand equivalents are actually playing. In the end, players who play in hard competitions are generally going to be better at playing than their opponents who play less and train more.
Not to mention that they are available to play for the national side, if needed.
The case of Cory Jane makes this point. He missed all of this year’s Super Rugby tournament but two games in the ITM Cup have been enough to convince the All Blacks selectors he is ready to play against the Wallabies at Dunedin on Saturday.
In Australia this could not have happened because there is no rugby outside of the Wallabies available to the top players.
I’m wondering, too, if all the training actually sets up the players to be more easily injured than if they trained less and played more.
in 2007 a number of senior All Blacks were taken out of the Super rugby tournament for nearly two months for special training to prepare them for the Rugby World Cup tournament.
For the first and only time, the All Blacks were beaten in the quarter-finals, with several of the stars, including Dan Carter, going down injured.
So much for the extra training.
In my view, there is no noticeable superiority in fitness or in skills in the Australian players over their South African and New Zealand opponents that comes out of the longer training sessions.
In general the South African and New Zealand teams, with players who play more matches each year and get a shorter break at the end of the season, are fitter, tougher and more successful than their Australian counterparts.
There is a huge need in Australian rugby for an equivalent of the Currie Cup and ITM Cup tournament.
I would say that it is the most important issue facing the board of the ARU. Unfortunately there seems to be a lack of ideas and discussion about what this Australian Championship (my title) should look like.
Here’s an idea. It should be a national club championship. The premiership clubs in Sydney and Brisbane (for complicated historical and geographical reasons) are the equivalent of provincial rugby in South Africa and NZ.
So an Australian equivalent of a provincial tournament would be a national tournament of the top six Sydney clubs, four from Brisbane and the Gold Coast and the leading clubs in Melbourne and Canberra.
These clubs could be boosted by, say, two or three outside players whose clubs are not in the tournament.
If properly promoted The Australian Championship could have a great appeal and create the willing, hard, competitive rugby that is currently lacking at this time of the year in Australian rugby.
The ARU and the clubs are apparently having some earnest and heated discussions about their future and future competitions. Why not go with something that is already virtually in place and which has the tribal resonances that enhance the value of tournaments to the players and supporters?
If the Super Rugby franchises object (as they probably will), their objections should be overruled. Players get better and tougher playing rugby rather than training to play it some time in the distant future.
This will benefit Australian rugby in the wide context in the future, and if only they the Super Rugby franchises had the wit to realise this.