- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
We are officially in one of the wettest, coolest summers in recent history. We are also in the coldest part of the off-season for rugby. That whole: ‘it gets darkest just before the dawn’ thing? Yeah, that’s now.
I can no longer taste the victory when I remember the Wallabies beating the French on the spring tour – it was too long ago. The Ashes have been decided, the blame game has started, and tears have flowed.
As a nation we have moved on and are now collectively focusing on how much of a waste of time the 7 game One Day series is, against the same team we have been playing since late spring.
Yes, the off-season.
At this stage I’d like to see a return to the Tri-angular One Day series of yesteryear. Packer was right. Not just cricket though.
If there was free to air coverage of the infantile Melbourne Rebels actually getting to play trial rugby games against second rate Tongan sides – I’d watch. I’ll take it further than that. I’d watch a NSW Academy side play a trial game against the Fijian Navy rugby team right now.
Such a desperate state, I know.
Without any of those heavenly contests available I might have to go and watch NSW vs. QLD in the KFC Big Bash tomorrow instead. That’ll kill 3 hours.
Yes, the off-season.
In order to keep myself sane, I’ve got to thinking about some details of the rugby season. There are a couple of things that go hand-in-hand and I don’t think have gotten much attention yet – byes, the draw and expansion. I don’t want to make this sound like a rant or simply a stream-of-consciousness – but it is. We’ll see how this goes.
By sane I mean everyone occasionally tries to find things that kill seemingly endless, vast swathes of time. Remember staring out the window in class at school?
Or the frantic search for something remotely interesting to read in the newspaper on that long train commute from work? Even if that means reading the MX – the afternoon paper made by the people that bring you the quality programming that is Foxtel. That type of sane.
Byes are just plain boring.
They wreck a competition. Do fans ever want byes? No. Do byes make more money? No. Should elite competitions have bye weeks? No. I don’t think so anyway.
There is merit to the idea that bye weeks are good for recovery from injuries for players. But bye weeks seem to only slow momentum of the competition. In Super Rugby each team will get 2 byes this year. That’s fairly atrocious. For two weeks every fan of a team will probably be about 50% less interested in the competition. For two weeks a team can’t make money from gate receipts to pay their players. For two weeks a television market will have one less team to barrack for.
The English Premier league is a hard competition because of the week-in, week-out high stakes nature of the competition. Sure isn’t a high contact league, but it puts a demand on a strong deep squad of players. It gets exciting because inevitably the younger, flashier, riskier players will see pitch time.
With 15 teams in our competition, a bye is inevitable. That doesn’t mean it’s good, though.
That leads me to the next point. The best way to alleviate the ‘need’ for byes as regularly is to have an even number of teams in the competition – expansion. That way a single bye could be rotated through the competition as sort of a leveller to let players rest – if it has to be at all.
However, if we want to keep this conference mentality going, we actually need to expand by three teams at the same time next time we expand. Here is why.
Imagine a 16 team competition with three conferences.
It’s going to get very interesting, if not downright silly when the next round of expansions come along. Eastern Cape is going to get a ticket into Super Rugby; it seems that much is assured.
But ideally for a 16 team competition we need four groups of for, or two groups of eight. What do we do? We can’t go NFL style and just name them north, south, east and west.
Our geographical spread just doesn’t work like that (neither does theirs actually). We could go college football style and just make arbitrary names such as the ‘Sun Belt Conference’ or ‘Mountain West Conference’ – we could actually use that to divide into two conferences.
Make one all the teams West of the Great Dividing Range on the eastern seaboard of Australia in one conference, and everyone to the east on the other.
That almost works.
The bye is going to be a bug bear of our competition for sometime. It decreases the value of the product significantly. Hopefully before long we have a Western Sydney, Eastern Cape and a South Auckland or Pacific Island team to join the three conferences in time to make this work.
As a package a three conference 18 team tournament would be fantastic. It means that if we need to we could rotate through one bye week for each team and the season would fill the calendar.
At this point I can only imagine one significant draw-back of that idea – useless games. More teams in a competition means, more likelihood of games that don’t matter at the end of the season.
Teams will know sooner whether they will make the finals series or start ‘building for next year’ a few rounds early. That happens in many leagues around the world including the NFL and AFL. But that is only a small problem.
The best way to find a solution to meaningless games is to truly turn the Super Rugby tournament into a champion’s league style tournament that needs qualification from a home competition.
That will hopefully be in the back of the minds of the men running SANZAR and holding fort in each union. It solves the problem of useless games because you need to play to your full potential until the end of the season to gain a place at the big boys table.
No team is going to waste time on the field with that at stake.
With a team in Western Sydney and possibly the Gold Coast, Australia would be in a position to have a full tournament each year within itself that can submit the top four teams to a Super 12 Champions League competition along with New Zealand and South Africa.
Having said that, right now, I’d watch one of those useless games anyway.
The off-season. See where it takes you?
I’ve already started thinking about home-field advantage, but I won’t go there in print today. I wish there were some games to pick apart.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.