The best Rugby Championship ever?
(INCLUDES POLL) It’s taken ten editions, but at last the Rugby Championship is delivering some real theatre as a tournament.
Photo: @Lospumas on Twitter
Revel in this one, folks. We’ve been waiting for it ever since the Tri-Nations morphed into a four-team tournament with Argentina’s arrival in 2012. With two rounds to go in the first proper Rugby Championship since COVID struck, having an even number of teams finally produced a grandstand finish: any one of the quartet can win the thing. After six weekends of trading blows, the table is a logjam.
Here’s how it looks going into round seven, which starts TOMORROW (yep, a Thursday) in Melbourne.
When the real All Blacks turn up on a weekly basis and start sauntering to the title again, or the Springboks join the Six Nations and we’re stuck with an odd number of teams once more, this may be the tournament we’ll look back on as the apogee of the Southern Hemisphere’s international tournament. I don’t know if buying DVDs is still a thing, but I reckon this one will be worth having on the shelf.
Tired script torn up
To fully appreciate why this edition of the Rugby Championship is such a marvel, first we must consider the yin to its yang. The fact that the tournament as a whole had become staid and predictable.
I’m not talking about the quality of the individual games. There have been plenty of top-class corkers down the years, make no mistake. But the overall narrative was a script that wrote itself for most editions. Unless it was a World Cup year and priorities were elsewhere, you knew the All Blacks were always going to win it.
Yes, the Kiwis were very good, but the Bledisloe Cup dynamic played a big part in their coasting to most titles. Australia were serially incapable of posing a threat to the Kiwis, while South Africa, who could realistically hope to split wins with New Zealand, couldn’t win an away game in Australia the way their arch-rivals so effortlessly could. Argentina, meanwhile, weren’t good enough over the course of a full campaign to mount a serious challenge.
Would it have been so easy to write that precis given a bit of imagination for the fixture list? We’ll never know, because nearly every tournament would begin with the New Zealanders whipping the Aussies in the same miles-outta-town Sydney stadium. This was thanks to a long-term deal announced in 2011, but which thankfully seems to have petered out early. The All Blacks would then repeat the result a week later at home. While the Kiwis racked up bonus points and a momentum that became increasingly familiar as the years went by, the Springboks would be first to take on Argentina. The Pumas were typically most obstinate early in the competition. The Saffers would get their wins, but rarely with bonus points.
With a setup like that, the remaining three-quarters of the competition would play out as a contest between the Wallabies and Springboks for second place. The showpiece matches between South Africa and New Zealand would come at the very end, but rarely was there a realistic chance for the Boks to overhaul their foes on the points table.
A twist of narrative
Yes, COVID delivered a twist to the tale for a couple of years. We got the complete absence of the Springboks from the 2020 tournament. Then, last year, most of the matches were played in Australia, with quarantine playing its part for some teams more than others. Not the right sort of twist, really.
Now that we’re (hopefully) in a post-pandemic world, there’s been a (slightly lopsided) return to the home-and-away rugby. Rather than going back to the tried and tranquillising, a shakeup was agreed. After going the better part of two years without any home tests (at least not with spectators), South Africa would host the All Blacks twice to kick off the tournament. The Pumas and the Wallabies, used to squaring off in a sad finale with little consequence, would square up in Argentina that same weekend.
See what that did? Instead of gliding into the tournament against an opponent on which they’d put the voodoo, New Zealand were away to their most respected foes. And the Pumas would begin the Rugby Championship with two home cracks at the team against which they announced their arrival as a Rugby Championship force to be reckoned with. They’ve known they can beat Australia in this tournament since as long ago as their breakthrough win in Mendoza in 2014.
These changes alone give the race a totally different dynamic; for momentum and confidence to build differently instead of old fears and scars to deepen. What role did that play in Argentina’s away win in New Zealand, I wonder? Long may mixing it up – the Six Nations approach, if you will – be integral to Rugby Championship scheduling.
It wasn’t just that first weekend. We’ve seen the novelty of a rugby test at the Adelaide Oval, a return to the sport’s spiritual home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and an increasingly rare international in poor old Christchurch, that city without a proper stadium – and now that city where AB’s lost to Argentina.
Back across the Tasman, the Wallabies finally get to resume their epic Bledisloe Cup quest somewhere other than Sydney, a city that seems to bring out the worst in them. (Unless we’re talking about disciplinary incidents involving nightclubs, in which case it’s Cape Town.) Their scant history in Melbourne promises much: they won two out of three against the All Blacks at the MCG around the turn of the century. And more specific to next weekend’s venue, Docklands Stadium, this is where they struck back after an opening defeat on the last two Lions tours.
Even Argentina has thrown a scheduling curve ball with a last-minute switch of stadium for this weekend’s encounter with South Africa in Buenos Aires.
Sniff any which way you will – Thursday games, anybody? – and this Rugby Championship smells like a freshly-aired house. Though I have previously written that a Bok defection to the north would be good in terms of getting three-test tours back on the calendar, I’d feel pretty torn if it were to happen now that the quadrangular tournament has finally lived up to its potential.
But why has it been such a ding-dong?
The fixture list shuffled the cards in terms of the tired old storyline. The All Blacks aren’t their usual selves and Argentina’s best is getting better. All this has been part of the recipe for a close race for the trophy. But that in itself isn’t enough to explain why nobody has been able to string two wins together.
Not only has everyone struggled for consistency, but the swings of the pendulum have been big ones. The points table may be close, but the matches themselves rarely have. Only the All Blacks have picked up a losing bonus point for being within a score at the end, thanks to that seven-point loss to the Pumas. Other than that, teams have been trading comfortable wins.
It's a bit of a head-scratcher, that. Is the Rugby Championship getting closer, or isn’t it?
For my money, it really is getting closer. The lopsided scores are just a more graphic illustration of the fact that being a hair of a fraction off against any side on a given day is no longer something you can hope to get away with. Au contraire, that side will punish you more ruthlessly than before. The opposition is that good – not just in the Rugby Championship but throughout the top-tier nations.
Whether this translates to the overall quality of rugby also having gone up, I’m not so sure. After all, this All Black team has been generationally dreadful at various points in the campaign and still leads the pack into the last weekend. Some of the handling errors in the Springboks-Australia game (wet ball noted) were not a great advert for the game, while teams have been naïve in selection (South Africa in Joburg) and tactically (All Blacks against that Puma wall in Christchurch).
There has been some dreadful discipline on display, notably in the two Pumas-Wallaby clashes so far. Not that it should come as a surprise that these two teams get a mention here. The Argentineans have always had a way of getting under the skin of their opposition, but the Wallabies must now go down as their equals in this regard. I’m not sure if Dave Rennie cares whether anybody likes his side – I guess that’s not his job – but the Nic White collapsing-in-agony incident in Adelaide has made them an easy target. And they might do well to remember that while referees strive to blow the moment and not the reputation, they’re human too.
But while the diving needs to go back to whatever round-ball hole it crawled out of, even the ill-discipline has made for good entertainment. Eben Etzebeth’s manic face wouldn’t have come out to play on Saturday were it not for that questionable tackle on Makazole Mapimpi a week before.
Predictions…
Yes, this is the most open tournament we’ve ever seen and one in which we have come to expect the unexpected. Predictions ahead of the final two rounds seem pointless.
But despite all that, we do have a pattern to work with, don’t we?
Every round so far has seen a two-match mini-series on one side’s territory, with the wins shared between the hosts and the visitors. Considering that the final weekend now reverts to quick-turnaround home-and-away clashes, there’s all the more reason to expect the neat pattern to continue.
So, one more win for each nation, in its respective home game? Melbourne’s history and the fact that it’s not their first game of the tournament will get the Wallabies a win before Eden Park proves too much once again. The Pumas, stung by their second outing in New Zealand, will summon up a burst of passion to win in Buenos Aires – but South Africa will prevail in Durban the following week, avenging their horror loss to the South Americans there in 2015. Easy!
If that’s how it plays out – and even writing those words feels louche and dangerous – then bonus points and points difference will be decisive. Someone would need to match the All Blacks with a losing bonus point. There’s a long-term trend suggesting it won’t be the Australians in Auckland. Could it be Argentina in Durban? South Africa in Buenos Aires? Or does a walloping at Eden Park earn the Kiwis the three-tries-more bonus point (or healthy points difference, should it come to that) that secures the trophy regardless of a narrow loss for somebody else?
Or for something completely different, what if Hamilton was evidence that Argentina have given all they’ve got? This is a great test of whether their tendency to fall away over a campaign is a thing of the past. But if it’s not, then the draw falls nicely for the South Africans. Who will surely be haunted by the uncomfortable truth that if they can’t grab the title when New Zealand has this many problems, when can they?
But enough of my opinions - who do you think is going to take the trophy at the end of this tightest of Rugby Championships? Have your say on the poll below - it closes before kickoff in Melbourne tomorrow!
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