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Details of planned new professional New Zealand competition revealed - report

(Photo by Evan Barnes/Getty Images)

A New Zealand-based competition featuring up to eight professional teams, including the five existing Kiwi Super Rugby franchises, is being reported as the potential future of rugby in the land of the All Blacks.

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The New Zealand Herald reports it has been told by sources within New Zealand Rugby that Super Rugby as we know it is destined for the history books as officials scramble to create a new competition to allow some form of rugby to be played this year.

The Herald report states that teams from Australia and Fiji “may or may not” be involved in the plans, but long-haul flights to South Africa and Argentina will no longer be on the agenda.

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Despite NZR’s newly-announced Aratipu review into Super Rugby, the report indicates that there is a concession among officials that the competition has run its due course following a plummet in fan interest and engagement stretching over a decade-and-a-half.

The Herald attributes the decision to withhold New Zealand’s top All Blacks from the opening two months of Super Rugby in 2007 as the catalyst for the downfall in viewership figures, with the competition seeing a drastic TV audience dip of 29 percent that year alone.

NZR sources told the Herald that the desire to keep All Blacks playing in New Zealand is at the forefront of discussions surrounding a competition reboot.

“We don’t want the Brazil [football] model,” an NZR official said.

“Where all your top players are in clubs offshore. We’re determined to keep as many of our All Blacks here as we can.”

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The lure of New Zealand sides clashing against each other in local derbies week after week is an enticing prospect, but question marks remain over the future of the Mitre 10 Cup should such the new professional competition come to fruition.

The Herald states that the Mitre 10 Cup, New Zealand’s semi-professional provincial competition that sits a tier below Super Rugby, would still be played even after Super Rugby’s replacement tournament was over.

However, an NZR insider cited financial concerns over how the Mitre 10 Cup franchises could be funded alongside a fully professional competition featuring teams based exclusively in New Zealand.

“We can’t, and we won’t, turn provinces like Canterbury into fully amateur Heartland sides,” they told the Herald. “But we do need to work out just how many professional teams New Zealand can afford.”

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No date has been set for an announcement of any form of rugby competition in New Zealand, although the preliminary findings from the Aratipu review will be presented to the NZR board by the end of June.

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J
JW 1 hour ago
Why England's defence of the realm has crumbled without Felix Jones

This piece is nothing more than the result of revisionist fancy of Northern Hemisphere rugby fans. Seeing what they want to see, helped but some surprisingly good results and a desire to get excited about doing something well.


I went back through the 6N highlights and sure enough in every English win I remembered seeing these exact holes on the inside, that are supposedly the fallout out of a Felix Jones system breaking down in the hands of some replacement. Every time the commentators mentioned England being targeted up the seam/around the ruck or whatever. Each game had a try scored on the inside of the blitz, no doubt it was a theme throughout all of their games. Will Jordan specifically says that Holland had design that move to target space he saw during their home series win.


Well I'm here to tell you they were the same holes in a Felix Jones system being built as well. This woe is now sentiment has got to stop. The game is on a high, these games have been fantastic! It is Englands attack that has seen their stocks increase this year, and no doubt that is what SB told him was the teams priority. Or it's simply science, with Englands elite players having worked towards a new player welfare and management system, as part of new partnership with the ERU, that's dictating what the players can and can't put their bodies through.


The only bit of truth in this article is that Felix is not there to work on fixing his defence. England threw away another good chance of winning in the weekend when they froze all enterprise under pressure when no longer playing attacking footy for the second half. That mindset helped (or not helped if you like) of course by all this knee jerk, red brained criticism.

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