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Last week Rugby Pass published a story headlined ‘Why The Aviva Premiership is Better Than Super Rugby’. Fake news! This week, Jamie Wall sets the record straight.
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Here are the top seven reasons why, despite the conference system, Super Rugby is far superior to the Aviva Premiership:
Attack that actually works: Super Rugby is high-scoring because the players are just better at rugby. Low-scoring games can be good to watch, but defence is only as impressive as the attack allows it to be – there’s nothing particularly difficult about tackling a forward who is picking the ball out of a ruck, or a one-out runner coming straight at you (which is why league players can make upwards of 50 tackles a game). If your team’s game plan is so conservative that you’re only ever going to score less than 10 points, then the other team doesn’t exactly deserve a pat on the back for keeping you away from the try line.
It won’t ruin your Tinder game: Here in New Zealand, we don’t have to lock down every Friday or Saturday evening to watch our teams play. If the game is in Aussie, you can go out for a nice dinner or whatever, then get home to watch the match in Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne kicking off at 10 pm. If it’s overnight in Perth or South Africa, then wake up and watch a replay. If you go on a date that goes really well, you can both get up and watch a game in Buenos Aires at 9 am Sunday morning (if that’s what’s on your mind, but that’s entirely up to you).
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Weather – We’re four weeks into Super Rugby, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still go to a game in shorts and a t-shirt at more than a few venues – even in New Zealand. In fact, you can probably do that all season long in Brisbane, while you won’t need to break out a hoodie in Johannesburg or Pretoria for a while yet.
Team names: While the Blues and the Reds clearly didn’t put much thought into theirs, the team names in Super Rugby do provide some excellent educational opportunities in both flora and fauna for the casual viewer. Thanks to Super Rugby we all now know what a Waratah and a Brumby are, that you swim at your own risk in Durban, and that wolves can indeed howl at the sun as well as the moon.
Mascots – Captain Hurricane, Tah Man and the flamed-horned Bulletjie have been part of the competition for years now, but in the past 18 months Super Rugby has taken the mascot game to the next level with the additions of new kids on the block Jaguardo and Wolvie. Meanwhile, even though they’re not mascots, the Sharks ‘flasher girls’ provide a delightfully tacky reminder of what you can still get away with in South Africa.
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Better players: Hmmm, should we watch the current All Blacks, or the ones that got replaced by someone better? Or the guys that couldn’t even make the team at all, as well as a bunch of Englishmen I’ve never heard of? That’s pretty much the argument between watching Super Rugby and the English Premiership.
This try by Carlos Spencer: I’m just going to leave this here to finish with.
