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Super Rugby is changing, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be totally full of surprises. Jamie Wall predicts the storylines for a bloated season ahead.
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You almost have to feel sorry for the Super Rugby teams when the comp starts these days. It’s not the their fault it’s become so bloated. The tournament has burst the seams of the cricket season at one end and the test season at the other, and this year it’s only gotten more flabby with the addition of three new teams.
So, once our old friend arrives too early for the party yet again, what does Super Rugby season 2016 have in store? These are my predictions for the season ahead.
The Highlanders will torture the Blues. Again.
Reserve Highlanders hooker Greg Pleasants-Tate will most probably be wearing a black jersey this year, given the team’s unending quest to make a mockery of Auckland rugby by turning their cast-offs into All Black contenders.
A new Aussie team will take their turn to be the only good one apart from the Brumbies and Waratahs
This time it’ll be the Rebels. Last season the men from Victoria showed they’ve finally moved past being a second-tier dumping ground and retirement fund for washed-up test players.
The Crusaders will be very bad
The best Super Rugby team in history is unlikely to make the playoffs, and may debase themselves by trying to coax Richie McCaw out of retirement. Meanwhile, Dan Carter will be relaxing on a huge pile of money in Paris, probably wondering why he didn’t move there 10 years ago.
Blues fans will rue the fact Akira Ioane is tied up with the national 7’s team
Ioane’s career is set up to create a beautiful piece of symmetry with the classic Japanese animated film ‘Akira’, set in a post-apocalyptic 2019 Tokyo. That’s also the venue and year of the next Rugby World Cup, one that Ioane is already predicted to have a destructive effect on.
New Zealanders will complain a lot
New Zealand’s other national pastime – whingeing – will take centre stage as people struggle to come to grips with the changes to the competition structure. However, it will not occur to them that they have absolutely no effect on the NZ conference.
Everyone will complain a lot
Criticism of the three new teams will continue despite the fact that two of them will offer friendly NZ TV viewing times for away matches. Add in a healthy dose of grumbling about ticket prices by those who go to the games and Justin Marshall’s commentary by those that don’t.
Sky Sport will struggle to find anything useful to say about the Jaguares
Since we won’t be able to take the local Spanish commentary of any Jaguares* games in Buenos Aires, we’ll have to put up with clichéd Sky Sport calls. Get ready for yet another update on how much Argentineans love scrums and how big the steaks are.
The poor Sunwolves will be permanently jetlagged
The Sunwolves will benefit greatly from the recent golden era of television, given the 1,000 or so hours they’ll spend in the air watching in-flight entertainment between fixtures. Full series blocks of The Wire and Breaking Bad will sure beat watching game film of them getting thrashed every week.
The South African teams will be unwatchable. Again.
The South African teams are going to hit new lows this year. They were horrible anyway, but now they’ve got to deal with the fact that the team with the best chance from their conferences isn’t even South African. Look for the Kings to be the first professional team to ever make their players cough up for subs.
The Hurricanes’ will put on a show, before having their hopes and dreams crushed in brutal fashion
The Hurricanes launch their new preseason show this week, imaginatively entitled ‘Hurricanes Pre Season’ and it will probably be heavily reliant on the screen presence of Cory Jane. It’ll have a lot of work to do to be as entertaining as the last time the Canes had a show; the half-scripted ‘Hurricane PD’. Starring Ben Herring and Luke Mahoney, it somehow squeezed several episodes out of the idea of piss-taking the Beastie Boys track ‘Sabotage’.
Next Friday is shaping up to be a decent night of footy, to be fair. The opener between the Highlanders and Blues will give Tana Umaga a fair indication of whether he’s made a horrible job choice or not, while the Hurricanes will open with a win over the Brumbies and start inflating that Wellington sports hope balloon that generally gets popped around finals time.
*Fun fact: the Jaguares have often been referred to as the Pumas team in another jersey, which is ironic since the actual Argentine national jersey does in fact have a jaguar, not a puma on it.
