- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
ARU boss Bill Pulver is full of confidence that the newly-proposed Super 18 format will be a winner.
In fact he’s banking on it to be the ARU’s financial saviour, adding that the ARU coffers would have been exhausted by next year unless something radical was done with Super Rugby.
Which begs the question: do senior rugby administrators like Pulver ever ask the players about something as important as a major format change?
Take a Wallaby who firstly plays for his Super franchise, then turns out for the Wallabies in the June window. He then backs up for the Rugby Championship against the All Blacks and the Boks, before ending the year with the northern hemisphere tour.
The biggest killer in that program is the travel, and SANZAR has just upped the ante with extra games.
Make no mistake, every Super Rugby game is as intense and as hard as a Test. There’s only a certain amount the body can stand in a tough contact sport that requires travel around Australia, and to South Africa, Argentina, and New Zealand.
And if Pulver gets his way, a team from Asia will be in the Super 18 just to make the travel factor more debilitating.
I can’t stress the travel factor more. It sounds exotic playing rugby all around the world, but in the end constant travel gets you.
And when it does, there’s no amount of contract money that will overcome the sheer boredom of getting on and off a plane, and waking up the next morning wondering where the hell you are – what country, what city.
So if Pulver and his mates want to bring rugby careers to a premature conclusion, keep adding the already overpowering program and the obvious extra chances of being injured.
Tired bodies injure easily.
Super 18 looks a done deal – that’s the top side according to Bill Pulver.
The bottom side? The attrition rate will be a done deal.