LONG READ Northern sides would toil in Super Rugby? The numbers say different

Over the past few weeks, political realities all over the world have been reshaped and a new phoney war has begun. It has not taken long for the proponents of southern hemisphere rugby in general, and Super Rugby Pacific in particular, to follow suit and muscle in on the action. The fake news is already being spread around generously.

Witness the following recent exchange on Stan Sport between journalist Iain Payten, respected Australia legend Tim Horan, and ex-New South Wales and Wallaby scrum-half Nick Phipps:

Payten: “The key stat that gets talked about a lot at Super Rugby Pacific, in the head office there and even amongst the referees is ‘game duration’.”

Horan: “As in ‘ball-in-play’?”

Payten: “No, no not ball-in-play, because that can be skewed by a bunch of different factors. It’s literally like, ‘first whistle to last whistle’. Super Rugby last year was 91 minutes – half-time doesn’t count – and then you’re talking about how much time and stoppages, and that’s about four or five minutes less [than in the] URC or Top 14 etc. And the referees are on board with that, and you can actually see they get miffed if there are stoppages they don’t want.”

Phipps: “I watched Six Nations three or four weeks ago and the opposition [number] nine – the one without the ball at a scrum – he was down having a break pretending he was injured, and Ben O’Keefe was like ‘Get up, get up! We’ll play on, start the scrum.’ Ben O’Keeffe got slammed for that…

“I would argue you couldn’t drop the best five club teams of the northern hemisphere into Super Rugby and they’d survive, whereas we could drop our best five in the northern hemisphere and they’d do really well.”

The initial part of the Stan Sport conversation was all about the attempt to replace ‘ball-in-play time’ with ‘game duration’. The idea behind the new narrative is to reinforce the tired old assumption rugby is somehow faster and more aerobically demanding south of the equator than it is in the stodgy, set-piece-based north. You could only feel sorry for Horan, having to play the straight man between two wiseacres in a comedy sketch.

World Rugby first announced four new laws designed to speed up the game globally in November 2024 – including the 60-second limit for goal-kicks, 30-second set-up for lineouts, squint throws allowed with no contest, and a faster reset at scrums – and they have been already applied by northern-based officials in all the three major domestic competition in the first three months of 2025. Nothing new to see here.

‘Game duration’ may be the latest fad, but ‘ball-in-play time’ remains the gold standard measure for active, significant play in a game of rugby. It is the criterion used by the major supplier of statistical information to professional teams all over the world [Opta], and the World Rugby definition could not be more lucid: ‘Total ball in play is match time minus any time in the match when neither team is in possession of the ball.’

The ball-in-play facts do not support the assumptions of Payten and Phipps. Although there has been a big upsurge in ball-in-play time, and try-scoring off from it, in the current SRP season as I recently pointed out, the figures for the last complete regular season[s] tell a very different story.

It is the same at international level. The 2024 Six Nations featured an average of 38.3 minutes of ball-in-play, the Rugby Championship later in the year over three-and-a-half minutes less, at 34.7. Within that context, it is hard to believe clubs with a healthy majority of international-quality players, such as Leinster in Ireland, Stade Toulousain and Union Bordeaux-Bègles from the Top 14, URC champions Glasgow Warriors and English standard-bearers Northampton Saints would be run off the field in Super Rugby. They all know how to cope in fast, aerobically demanding games of rugby at the highest level. They do far more than merely survive; they thrive in those settings.

The true target of the Stan Sport broadcast was not just the north in general, but South Africa playing in the north specifically. The 2023 World Cup was the first tournament since 1995 where average ball-in-play time decreased from the previous tournament, and that reduction was an active part of South Africa’s ability to repeat their 2019 victory.

The Springboks specialise in winning games when they can control the tempo, play in bursts, and finish strong on the back of a 6-2 or 7-1 bench split. The pattern was duplicated at the 2024 Rugby Championship, when the Bokke again emerged as clearly the best team, but one playing off a low ball-in-play base.

If you use the ‘game duration’ matrix, there is less than one minute thirty seconds between all the team averages, but the ball-in-play stats reveal some genuine differences in approach to the game.

South Africa’s low ball-in-play time implies more stoppages, a lot of ‘dead time’ which protects their starters and amplifies the impact of their power and size off the bench. And within the frame of a fragmented, stop-start rhythm they can up their own active time of possession to over 55%, more than any other nation in the tournament.

The Payten/Phipps conversation is ultimately taking aim at the Springboks, who are the modern masters at controlling the cadence of matches and managing the seesaw between ‘rest’ periods and sharp, intense bursts of ‘work’ activity. In due time, that conversation will become part of a sustained assault on the established formula for ultimate success in the contemporary era, as espoused by South Africa at the last two World Cups and in the Rugby Championship, and by Toulouse and La Rochelle in the most recent iterations of the European Champions Cup.

France copycatted the Bokke in their 42-27 rout of Ireland, selecting a 7-1 bench with one big tight forward monster replacing another, and a back-row forward [Oscar Jégou] expected to fill in at centre for the last half hour of the game. They began to empty their bench in the 46^th minute with the replacement of centre Pierre-Louis Barassi by loose forward Jégou, and five other forwards leaving the field two minutes later. Les Bleus won the last 25 minutes decisively, by a score of 34-14.

Only a few weeks ago, ex-England World Cup winning coach Clive Woodward suggested shifting Saracens back-row Ben Earl to 12, a position he had played previously as a schoolboy. “He’s quicker than most of the backs,” quipped Sir Clive, and the idea did not look quite so outlandish after Jégou’s cameo in Dublin. The young La Rochelle flanker looked thoroughly at home in his new surroundings

Les Bleus experimented with a hybrid forward/back at their home World Cup, with Sekou Macalou often appearing as a makeshift left wing, but Jégou took the trial to a different level. The 21-year-old with 21 on his back looked assured enough in attack with his ‘hybrid’ power to the fore.

If anything, he was even better on defence, with the power to stop big backs such as Robbie Henshaw in their tracks, front-on.

That power was mated to the agility to turn out and catch inside backs such as 10 Sam Prendergast from behind.

After being suckered by the short decoy run initially, Jégou not only has the speed to turn and catch the young Leinster fly-half, he has the strength to dislodge the ball in the tackle and force a fumble when he gets there.

First the young man is making a tackle on Josh van der Flier in open field in true back-row fashion, then he is back up on his feet and reading the short kick in behind like an inside back on the very next play.

The short Stan Sport exchange between Payten and Phipps hinted at a full-scale media offensive to come, with the British and Irish Lions tour less than four months distant. The novelty of ‘game duration’ was used as the latest stick with which to beat the slow, stodgy set-piece slackers in the north, who drop down injured at every opportunity for a breather.

Did it matter that the playing approaches of clubs like Leinster, UBB, Northampton and Glasgow were wilfully ignored? Not at all. Suddenly none of those teams, or even champion club Toulouse, were good enough to take the places of any of their equivalents in Super Rugby. The more the merrier.

It was the first shot in a phoney war, and it is only a matter of time before the target settles on South Africa. The signs are the France are heading towards the same Bokke blueprint, and we may see ever more forward/back hybrids such as Jégou to facilitate the 7-1 split. It is a ‘sliding doors’ moment, and the struggle for rugby’s soul has only just begun [again].