So I hung it in the air in my last Striking It Rich column before the start of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry Series and after four matches it has been answered - New Zealand rugby has suffered because of their decision to expel South African rugby from Super Rugby and it is one of the significant reasons why the Springboks are now the dominant team.
I put it out as a question, for the theory needed testing. I thought the All Blacks were up against it because New Zealand rugby was in a time warp similar to that which South Africa was in when the country came out of international rugby isolation in 1992. Meaning back when we thought the Currie Cup was so strong as a competition it almost had the status of a World Cup.
The Boks quickly discovered on their return to international competition that isolation hammers your game. And isolation is hammering New Zealand.
No, of course it is not a similar kind of politically driven isolation from all international rugby we are talking about, but the Kiwi franchise/club teams being tied to a Super Rugby competition that, since the departure of the South African franchises, has only featured the Australians and Pacific island teams in addition to the New Zealanders.
And given the pressure the union code is coming under from the Rugby League code in those countries, it has led to a change in the way the game is played and officiated, with ball in time play and what is perceived as fluent, attacking rugby being king.
We saw an example of how well that fluent continuity can work for New Zealand when the All Blacks scored a 32 phase try just before halftime in Baltimore. But throughout the RGR series, and indeed the tour games that preceded that, we saw something else - the All Blacks are weak at scrum time, in dealing with the contestable kicking game and when asked to legally defend, and note that emphasis, a driving maul they are just not at the races.
Why is this? Well, it could well be because the scrum as a means to anything other than restarting the game has been sacrificed in importance in Super Rugby, where it would probably also be frowned upon to take up valuable game time mauling that could be put to use entertaining the crowd with hand to hand running rugby.
The New Zealanders I spoke to during the tour were all pretty open about it - the drive there is to make rugby more like league. Hence, and this is me speaking, an emphasis in Super Rugby that simply doesn’t prepare New Zealand players for what they will be assaulted with when they play the Boks.
They used to be more ready for the Boks than they are now just because they played a lot of franchise rugby against the Boks and in South Africa when this country was part of Super Rugby.
SOUTH AFRICA’S MOVE TO THE NORTH PREPARES FOR ALL EVENTUALITIES
It may well be that there is a slight adjustment that the South African players have to make when they play New Zealand after a break of a year. Or Australia for that matter, with the Wallabies winning the tempo battle and effectively outlasting the Boks and running them off their feet in that horrible loss at Ellis Park last August.
But in the United Rugby Championship and in the Champions Cup it is not as if the South African players do not face teams that could be likened in style to the Kiwis (and Aussies). Think of Franco Smith’s all court style at Glasgow Warriors. Glasgow have an outstanding and unpredictable attacking game, and yet they are also one of the best mauling teams around.
In fact, think of one of Smith’s predecessors as Glasgow coach. His name is Dave Rennie. There is plenty of Kiwi influence in both the competitions the South African sides are involved in, with just out of the top of my head Munster being guided by a coach who has coached in Super Rugby.
Australian Stephen Larkham was for a long time involved with Munster too, when they had a South African coach in Johann van Graan bringing the hard edges from this country.
There is an occasional northern hemisphere coach who pops up in Kiwi regional teams, and Mike Blair, the All Black attack coach, is a Scot, but when it comes to the Super Rugby sides from New Zealand and Australian bringing South African or northern hemisphere influence I always think of Jake White.
The 2007 Bok World Cup winning coach went to the Brumbies for a few seasons and he turned them into a competitive unit by introducing a South African angle with a focus on mauling and other aspects of the game that has contributed to the success of his homeland.
He took them to a Super Rugby final in his first season, but became unpopular because he was coaching a game that Australians didn’t enjoy watching or understand.
By playing in the URC and Champions Cup, the South African teams come up against a variety of different playing styles and teams that have benefitted from the cross-pollination of ideas spawned by having multi-cultural coaching teams - and playing personnel - and because there isn’t a drive to become League the scrums and mauls are a big part of every team’s weaponry.
The All Black players, who also have to be home based if they want to play for their country so don’t get that extra bit of rugby education that the overseas based Boks do, don’t get the exposure to the same variety of styles and approaches that SA players do.
And as long as they are going to be the main lobbyists for the scrum to be de-powered and turned into just a restart mechanism, they are going to be exposed when playing against teams that do place importance on that aspect of the game and do so on a regular basis at club level.
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT
When the All Blacks were whitewashed by the Boks in the 2009 Tri-Nations, they learned from the experience. Like now they struggled with the South African kicking game, which was why the Joe Rocococko type of wing went out of vogue over there, with someone like Ben Smith, who had played much of his rugby as as a fullback, moving to the wing to blunt the kick threat.
That is just one example of a Kiwi reset that saw them working hard on what had let them down in that 2009 Tri-Nations in the year before they next played the Boks. Much of that work happened in Super Rugby, with there being a big drive across all the franchises to help the All Blacks by emphasising the areas that needed improving.
The franchises might have suffered because of the learning process they put themselves through, for that was the year, 2010, when two South African sides, the Bulls and Stormers, dominated Super Rugby, and ended up playing each other in the final at Orlando Stadium in Soweto.
The short term pain was translated into long term gain though when battle with the Boks was resumed in what was then still the Tri-Nations. Can the All Blacks/New Zealand rugby repeat now what they did then? I’d wager that with no South African teams being part of Super Rugby, it would be much harder to do.
I’d also suggest that if aspects of forward play are sacrificed in Super Rugby in the interests of making the game look more like the League game, New Zealand rugby might forever find themselves lagging in the aspects of the game where the Boks have gone ahead. And where, in my view anyway, France and maybe even England could soon go well ahead of them too.
New Zealand must be wary of following the path of Australia, the nation they are most exposed to in Super Rugby, by minimising the importance of core aspects of rugby union that make it the sport that it is. If they do, they might end up going in the same direction when it comes to their performance levels.
NEIL, YOU AND YOUR KIWI MATES NEED TO GET WITH THE PROGRAM
So surprise, surprise, while most Kiwis appeared to give the Boks credit for being the better team over the series, there was at least one All Black management member who remained consistent to the whinge mode that was current throughout the tour but which they quite bizarrely, through their media, tried to accuse Rassie of.
After the Baltimore game, the All Black assistant coach Neil Barnes accused English referee Karl Dickson of not handling the scrums correctly, even though there were hardly any scrum penalties, and said that penalties were awarded against the All Blacks for ‘bugger all’.
His whinge speaks to my earlier point about isolation making you insular in your view and perhaps being blind to what is beyond your blinkers. There were three northern hemisphere referees who officiated in the RGR series, and they all blew a certain way. Ironically, although far from coincidentally, the Australian Angus Gardner blew it completely differently.
The chasm that is widening between the Antipodean view of rugby, which is encapsulated by their “innovations” introduced to Super Rugby to make it a quicker game (to make it like League in other words), was something I first noticed when listening to the commentary on some of the All Blacks’ Nations Championship games before the series started.
There seemed to be a feeling of incredulity from the Kiwi commentators, and the Australian one’s too coming to think of it, when it came to some of the calls made during those games. The TMO seems to be less involved in Super Rugby than it is in other competitions, and there was surprise at some of the things that were looked at, while head shot protocols don’t seem to be quite as strict over there too.
My advice to the likes of Barnes would be to get with the program, start understanding that not everything revolves around New Zealand, like it might have in rugby a decade ago when they were the top nation in the sport, and that decisions that come out of the Shape of the Game conferences are formed through consensus and that is what the referees, with the possible more influenceable ones from Australia, are following.
A GREAT FINALE
It was a bit of a shock to the system to be spending Saturday waiting for a game to happen on my television. Up until then, I had been at every RGR game live, so sitting alone at home with my cat for company was an anticlimactic way for what had been a great series to end.
That is speaking from my personal view of course. I noted Hanyani Shimange, in an interview with Justin Marshall on Breakdown, said he really enjoyed the experience of being at the Baltimore game. I am sure he did, but he is one of the few privileged enough to be there.
For most of the rest of us, and I am judging this from the reluctance of my mates to come and watch the Baltimore game with me on the basis that 11pm was so late and “why are they playing in America anyway”, it just felt wrong. Two friends did finally come and join me (and Ginger) for the game, but it just felt like there was a lack of buzz, and I lost count of how many told me the last match didn’t matter as the series in SA had already been decided.
Yes, I have tons of SA mates living in the USA who made it to the Baltimore game and I am happy for them. Clearly there is a hunger to see the Boks from the expat community. But a series in South Africa should really have the trophy lift in a finale played in South Africa when there’d be maximum eyes and the general attitude of the population hadn’t gone from being intensely engaged to borderline narfy.
As I said in my most recent column, if there has to be a “money game”, it should be either at the start of the series, perhaps in the buildup, or at another time when it can be a standalone and not part of a competition.
Having said all that, let it be said that Baltimore, from what we did see on television, looked like a wonderful occasion, and the game itself was a fitting end to the series. It was fast, high quality and had all the elements that a good rugby union game should have, and the All Black refusal to die enabled them, like they had for most of the series, to hang in and keep everything in the balance until the 10 minutes.
Certainly no-one can complain about the entertainment and quality that was dished up over four successive Saturdays and it does seem that most of the rest of the world are quite unanimous about one thing - the two teams that compete for the RGR trophy are the best in the world right now and have produced a level that the rest can only aspire to.
I will come back later in the week for one final Striking It Rich dedicated to the RGR tour in which I will give out my tour awards and discuss the possibilities for future RGR tours.