Saving Super Rugby from itself

Forgive me Father, it has been more than a year since my last article for The Roar.

But every time I have sat down to wax lyrical about the darkness, or bemoan the fall from grace of Wallabies and Springboks, or lament the all-court but knee-high offloading game of the Pumas, within moments I found myself wrestling with a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, ensconced in a paradox… how to save Super Rugby.

This I have now done, but allow me to first express my sympathies for Super Rugby’s much-maligned and put-upon administrators and managers. For theirs is no easy task, a fact I have, over the last year, come to appreciate so very deeply.

They are trying to manage approximately six or seven often conflicting objectives to produce a fair and compelling product. A myriad of time-zones and media interests, issues around player welfare and player retention (curse the North!), revenue demands, the uneven quality of raw product and so on. All of these conspire to defeat the best intentions of the best intentioned to design a thrilling competition.

But we are where we is, and if there is one thing my own head-scratching and chin-stroking has made me realise over the last year, it is that instead of moaning about the way things stand, we need to turn the inherent madness of Super Rugby into a virtue.

To start with, we need more teams. Five more teams, to be precise, bringing the total to 23. While this may at first seem an odd choice, it is worth remembering that not only is 23 a prime number, it is an Einsteinian prime that occurs twice in the list of fortunate numbers.

It is the first positive solution to Sun Tzu’s ‘China remainder theorem’. And as if that weren’t enough, 23 is one of the sacred numbers of the Principia Discordia, while who will ever forget the moment in ‘Matrix Reloaded’ where the Architect tells Neo that 23 is the number of people required to repopulate Zion.

But how to make up the 23? This turns out to be easier-peasier than you might imagine. New Zealand gets to keep its five, Australia and South Africa both drop one, Japan and Argentina get a second each, while teams are added from the South Pacific (two), the (West Coast of the) US (one), and China (one). The 23rd shall be whichever team won the previous European Rugby Champions Cup.

While a few of the additions should be able to hold their own from the get-go, for example, the Pacifica teams, others might be expected to struggle at first to compete to a sufficient standard. There are, however, various competition-wide stratagems that can be applied to level the playing field. For example, whichever team is lower on the table plays at home (with the notable exception of the Chinese team – for more on this, see below). Or the lower-placed team starts with a points or performance-enhancing-drugs advantage. Or age limits could be employed (e.g. the favoured team can field no one older than 17 or younger than 35 and not Brad Thorn).

In addition, specific strategies can be applied as required to specific teams, with a few examples listed below.

The second Japanese team – the ‘Samurai’ – will be made up of Sunwolves rejects. Any concerns that such a team would be fodder for its opponents will be allayed by allowing the captain to wield a Katana, though, consistent with the general rules of rugby, attacks above the shoulder will be a red card offence.

The second Argentinian team – the ‘Multitud Desenfrenada’ – could similarly be made up of Jaguares offcuts, with their competitiveness guaranteed by the simple expedient that when playing at home they need not secure the field perimeter and, where necessary, audience participation can be encouraged.

On reflection, in order to avoid the quite reasonable criticism that the above indulges in cheap national stereotypes, we could swap the two teams around and base the Samurai in Córdoba and the Multitud Desenfrenada in Fukuoka.

The benefits of including a Chinese team should be obvious – a new market with a population base of around 1.4 billion – and spookily timely, with Chinese authorities late last year announcing hugely ambitious plans for promoting rugby within the country.

In these mercenary times, such a boon is simply too great to ignore, but with no history of the game, the possibility of some embarrassing blowouts in the first few years is very real. Which is why the Chinese ‘Gāo Chuándān’ (High Flyers) will be based in the town of Tuiwa – which, at an altitude of over 4,700 metres, is the second-highest town in the world – and will play all their games at home.

Visiting teams, playing without substitutes, will be required to fly into Chengdu, and from there travel to Tuiwa by local bus. Against the Gāo Chuándān, the Samurai will be required to keep the Katana scabbarded at all times.

With regard to competition organisation, the new 23-team tournament will be played in seven groups, of which three will comprise five teams, three will comprise three teams, while the last will either be made up of seven teams or will be in a league of its own (to be determined by the toss of a coin at the start of each season).

The more mathematically astute among you will have noticed that either way, this adds up to more than 23 teams. But fear not, for rather than being a problem this is yet one more cunning way of evening the score, with the stronger teams required to play in more than one group at a time (all part of an emasculation-through-exhaustion strategy).

Beyond this, group composition will be decided by a joint committee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), using a criteria-based system of their own choosing but given the organisations involved we probably can’t completely discount the possibility of plain brown envelopes making an appearance at some point in the charade.

Each team will play all the other teams in its group twice (three times in a leap year) and all teams from the other groups once. Teams named after animals (real or imagined) may arrange additional games on an ad hoc basis if both feel that they are having a bad year. Teams that are not named after animals might like to reflect on their poor choice of name. No team may play itself. Ever.

At the end of the group stage, the seven group winners will be joined in the quarter-finals by an eighth team chosen by lot. The match-ups could potentially also be decided by the drawing of lots, though in the interest of raising the profile of the tournament among the general population thought could be given to incorporating some kind of dance- or bake-off into the process.

Once down to the four semi-finalists, I suspect most punters will have lost the will to live and won’t be particularly bothered about who plays whom. Eventually, there will be a final between two teams that administrators from all the participant unions will claim were the best two teams in the competition and so it all worked out to the good in the end.

OK, so when I read this all back it maybe isn’t quite the polished jewel of competitive perfection it seemed as I was writing it, but in my defence, it makes virtually as much sense as the current system, and at least has the advantage of being a lot more fun.

And if you all play your part it’s only one short Twitter campaign from adoption. So get to it.