This All Black team is full of Chiefs who haven't won anything

Well one thing that Bidwill has said is nonsense; The Canes came into their own this year and were definitely the dominant side, playing high speed, highly entertaining rugby.

But where Bidwill is right is his conclusion. It’s not the rugby that will win us the RWC back. So far Rennie has just given the ABs their confidence back, whereas Razor tried to turn them all into Crusaders, and just demoralised everyone.

What Rennie has failed to do is fix all the set piece woes that dogged Razor, and in fact the scrum has quite literally gone backwards. The AB scrum has never been dominant, but it was usually good enough for parity, and thats all our backs needed.

The very real problem is that you can take the player out of Super Rugby, but you can’t take the Super Rugby out of the player. So which do we want? entertaining rugby, or cup winning rugby? Your call, NZ Rugby.

Arguably, the Chiefs manage to make deep finals runs so often because they have such a deep roster (especially since they added Taranaki to their regions at a time when the region became a powerhouse), particularly in the loosies and backs. The problem with just relying on players from title winning teams though is that you still have to consider how much of the share of the overall talent they have and how much that influenced their success in the overall competition.

It was different when the Aussie SR teams were stronger and when we had the SA teams in there but without them, we’re competing with other NZ teams and having some teams hoarding more of that talent at the expense of others. I’ve said this to death, but a lot of Razor’s success, especially running a setpiece heavy game, came from having most of the ABs starting tight five in his pack, meaning that they’re essentially playing their understudies in most of those matchups rather than having as many direct matchups with closer positional rivals. Clearly with the way the ABs played under him, he expected the ABs to be able to do the same against their opponents despite other countries having more forwards heavy games than us.

This is the argument though for forcibly ensuring a lot more parity within Super Rugby and NPC. Most of the teams in the competition should be competitive. Whether this is done via a draft (either for new entrants or imports), trades, tighter salary caps and contract stipulations that count test money or creative scheduling who knows, but teams like the Highlanders or Force constantly vying for wooden spoons while the Crusaders go on runs without losing much top talent doesn’t make the competition more sustainable. Going back to my example above, if that Crusaders pack (or in the past, the Blues backline) had enough of the players get test caps and qualify for a bigger contract, they’d have to let go of some of their players to teams that need them and therefore be under more pressure to repeat than they would be under the current system. Sharing NZ talent with Australian teams would go a long way too - makes sure everyone gets game time - not like the NRL doesn’t give the Warriors Australian talent.

It’s one thing that’s been great about this year’s NPC - teams like Northland, Harbour and Manawatu, teams that have regularly lost talent to bigger unions at least getting some imports from Aus (e.g. Israel Leota) helping them be more competitive than previous years. If we up that, then we get more All Blacks coming up who are used to having to being tested a lot more.