How to fix Super Rugby: Australians just need to win again

“For the first time in history these two teams will meet in the opening game of the season,” read the press release pumping the Rebels and Reds Super Rugby fixture, which is a perhaps inauspicious beginning to a press release given the Super Rugby season kicked off last week in South Africa.

However! Let’s not put the boot into a hard-working media colleague looking to pump the tyres of the dear, beleaguered, so-very-on-the-nose Super Rugby competition.

For that’s a tough gig. You try pumping the damned thing. It’s a blow-up rubber lilo the size of Boy Charlton Pool.

Crowds are down. Ratings are down. The brand is so on the nose that its rusted-on supporters would rather stand up sideline with a tinnie and a hot dog to watch Marlins and Rats on a Saturday afternoon than Waratahs versus Southern Kings (or whoever these anonymous giant Africans are) on a Saturday night in the beating heart of Sydney.

Super Rugby – and it pains a rusted-on Rah-Rah Man to say it – but Super Rugby sucks.

No it doesn’t. It doesn’t “suck”. It’s actually really very good. The footy itself, aesthetically, it’s entertaining. It’s world class.

But it’s very hard to watch because it doesn’t make us feel good.

And it doesn’t make us feel good because of all the “losing”. Losing makes people feel bad.

As in any sport – crowds and TV ratings drop off with loss. Outside of Newcastle Knights and the Henson Park faithful who get 8000 to every Newtown Jets game even when there’s two men and a dog, rugby supporters are like any supporters. They want to see winning. Or even competing against greater odds.

They want to feel good.

And in 2017 we felt bad.

How bad? In 2017 not one Australian Super Rugby team beat a Kiwi Super Rugby team in 26 attempts.

(AAP Image/Craig Golding)

I have Kiwi mates as we all have Kiwi mates. They stopped rubbing it in. There was no fun it. No sport.

New Zealand’s worst province, the Blues – beaten in the last round by Japanese Sunwolves, whatever they are – won more games than Australia’s best, ACT Brumbies, who made the finals because the competition is a basket-case designed by drunk versions of Duckworth and Lewis.

In 46 Super Rugby matches against overseas opposition, Australian teams lost 39 times.

In the 22 seasons of Super rugby, 2017 was the only one in which every Australian team lost more games than they won.

The Brumbies made the finals winning six games in 15 starts.

You could go on.

So let’s do that. Let’s go on.

Consider Australian rugby’s highest-paid player, Israel Folau, the all-leaping uber-athlete and gold-toothened superstar paid an estimated $1.1 million per year including third-party deals and $10,000 a Test.

Now, while it’s grossly unfair to malign or blame the man for the Waratahs’ lack of success, let’s rip in anyway.

Because Izzy Folau, by dint of his cost-benefit against the “W” columns of his teams, is not value for money.

In terms of publicity, for sure. He came from Australian rules and rugby league, a world-class, “famous” athlete. And he’ll score a spectacular try every now and again, and they’ll use it on highlights reels. And we’ll gasp and wonder: why can’t he do it more often?

Anyway, it’s not Israel’s fault the Waratahs conceded 522 points in 15 games (35 per game), third-worst in the comp ahead of Rebels (38 per game) and Sunwolves (44).

It’s not Israel’s fault the Blues put 40 on them or that the Jaguares put 40 on them, in Sydney.

Who’s fault is it? How about Waratahs’ former defence coach, Nathan Grey?

Now, love Nathan Grey, a super-fine performer for Waratahs and Wallabies, a tight little brick of a 12, a tough guy in the dark middle channels.

He was hard, Nathan Grey, and to see him in his training kit today you’d suggest he’s kept himself in tip-top shape in a “T-shirt” Tom Hafey sort of way.

Nathan Grey’s charges would be drilled in the Hard Ways of the Force.

But discredit where it’s due.

Because the Waratahs conceded 68 tries (fourth-worst from 18 teams) including five in their last game, a rain-soaked pizzling by now dead Western Force who put 40 on them.

The Waratahs’ defence was, to coin a phrase, completely shit-house.

And Nathan Grey got a promotion. He’s now defence coach of the Wallabies.

Ha. Isn’t that deal of the century for Nathan Grey? He’s negotiated a promotion devoid of performance-related pay.

Good luck to him. Because anyway, the Waratahs’ malaise isn’t Grey’s fault. You can’t put heads on statues. You can only do so much with the cattle that turns left out back of the abattoir.

Depth, as ever, is thin. Even with the axing of Western Force, Australia probably still has a surfeit of Super Rugby teams – and thus players – diluting the talent base.

There’s been kids who’d be honest Gordon Colts pulling on provincial jumpers.

Mate of mine played provincial rugby says: “Putting schoolboys into professional sport without performance-related pay leads to one thing: marshmallows.”

Globalisation means very good players have gone to Europe and Japan. Some have come back. But Australian rugby can’t compete with global market forces.

If Suntory or Wasps or old mate the crazy man in Toulon has a couple million spare, depth is be gone.

But three teams, more money in less contracts… you can look to keep Matt Toomua and Liam Gill and the really quite frightening Sitaleki Timani.

Meanwhile David Pocock went off to save the white rhino, a sabbatical finished with a stint playing rugby in Japan, and which now sees him laid up until May or thereabouts.

(AFP PHOTO / MARTIN BUREAU)

Now, Pocock is a very good human, and all power to him. Most of us would like to be David Pocock. Most of us would like to the strength of his convictions and his highly improbable arms.

Most of us want to save the white rhino.

But cast the question about to your greater claque of rugby-heads, and ask them what they see as the Greater Issues Facing The Game, and one thing comes back loudly, and it is this:

How the f*** are we paying David Pocock $750,000 to save the white rhino?

Now, we all want to save the white rhino. Go well, endangered white rhino.

But should Australian rugby have paid Pocock to do it?

Perhaps it should.

Hear this out: Pocock was the best player in the 2015 World Cup and, Israel aside, is the only Wallaby who could squeeze a buttock onto the All Blacks’ bench.

Yet he’s also the sort of character – holistic, principled, spiritual, an eco-warrior – who would have headed off to do something else if ARU hadn’t granted him leave.

Pocock, through his very good management, would have made it clear to ARU if they hadn’t worked it out themselves: rugby needs Pocock more than Pocock needs rugby.

Some dudes are too big to fail.

So, go well, endangered white rhino.

And go well Australian Super Rugby. There’s probably too many players. And you don’t win a lot. And we can’t watch you while standing up drinking a tinnie.

But you remain… you remain good.

But you do need to win.

And you need to do it soon. And a lot.

And that’s all she wrote.