Why Super Rugby competition is like a hastily thrown together bowl of minestrone soup

TALK about getting our hopes up! Just as the Reds pulled off a magic act at Suncorp Stadium, they will produce a disappearing act just as quickly.

QLD_SM_SPORT_REDS

THE Reds pulled off a magic act at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday. Now comes the disappearing act.

Sadly for Reds fans who luxuriated in their team’s upset over the Highlanders, the Reds now vanish into the middle of the night just as they are starting to look interesting.

Unless you are a diehard Reds fan, they may not gain your full attention until they play at Suncorp in three weeks because they now meet the Bulls in Pretoria at 1am next Sunday, then the Stormers in Cape Town at 11pm the following week.

Talk about pricking the balloon.

For all the chest pounding about the benefits of international expansion, the jury is very much out over whether this awkward format really works, especially in Australia.

There is an argument to say that, much like a hastily thrown together bowl of minestrone soup, there have been so many flavours added to Super Rugby, including teams from Japan and Argentina, it is difficult to tell whether it has a flavour at all.

The greatest rivalry in Australian sport, State of Origin, is a two-team competition where the jerseys are simple and the colours never change.

It would be interesting to get a group of floating football fans and ask them where the Cheetahs are from, could they name one player from the Bulls, could they identify the Sunwolves jersey, and which two teams have the fiercest rivalry in Super Rugby.

The Super Rugby draw I saw on Sunday has seven different game times printed for each game depending on which port you live in, from Tokyo to Transvaal.

Reds fans will have to wait three weeks for their side to return Down Under.

Call up the competition points table and you get six of them, including the national conference ladders.

If you are a rugby tragic you will happily wade through all of this but if you are a mildly interested, and there are hundreds of thousands in this category, there may be enough decent fodder delivered in predictable timeslots in other codes to make you simply drift away.

Many have.

Rugby, it must be said, is going gangbusters in the rest of the world.

The All Blacks are so big they attracted 61,500 to a Test against the USA in Chicago.

England’s players last week asked to be paid just under $A50,000 a Test, with their bargaining power franked by a Six Nations win, a grand slam, and the knowledge their governing body made a staggering $A400 million annual profit.

But in Australia rugby is just plodding, a surprise given the electric vibe of Australia’s World Cup final appearance only five months ago.

Television ratings are soft and even the Reds-Waratahs clash a couple of weeks ago, for decades considered a must-watch game, attracted a relatively modest 85,000 on Fox, around 40,000 less than The Real Housewives of Melbourne for whom the term facelift has an entirely different meaning.

Rugby league games regularly outrate Super Rugby games featuring Australian sides by four to one, a gap too wide for the peace of mind of rugby officials who accept that television money is the game’s lifeblood.

The rugby winter will come to life when Eddie Jones-coached England arrive for a Test series in June but the first half of the year has a conspicuous flatness about it.

The game appears to be in the shade of other codes and the fact that the Brumbies are the only Australian side in the top eight teams on the overall Super Rugby ladder has a lot to do with it.

As basic as it sounds, the great advantage the NRL and AFL competitions have over rugby is that every week of the season they are guaranteed to have winning Australian teams.

For every Melbourne Demons there must be a Hawthorn. If the Sydney Roosters lose five in a row it does not drag down the NRL because the ledger is balanced by the Broncos and Cowboys shooting the lights out.

Nick Frisby scored a memourable Suncorp stadium try. Picture: Jono Searle.

The punchline to every AFL season is a euphoric all-Australian success story. It has to be.

But in Super Rugby there is no guarantee any Australian team will star and that hurts.

Barely anyone in Australian rugby disagrees that five Australian teams is at least one team too many, but extra teams means extra product and extra money, never mind the fact that the stretched talent base becoming milkier than your grandma’s tea.

But what do you do?

Many Australian officials would love to cut ties with South Africa and start a separate competition with New Zealand but South African television rights are huge and Australia needs that money.

Kerry Packer once said to Australian cricket officials “c’mon gentlemen, admit it ... we are all harlots who have our price.’’

Only he would have been bold enough to say it.

Many sporting officials have since learnt its truth.