40 000 can’t all be wrong

Questions keep getting asked about the quality of rugby in this year’s Vodacom Super 14, with some critics and even administrators panning it for missing something following the departure of so many star players for Europe.

It is obvious both of last year’s finalists, the Sharks and the Bulls, have been hurt by the departure of experienced players. But how do you measure the quality of the rugby when it comes to the two major southern hemisphere competitions, the Super 14 and the Tri-Nations?

Every year the excitement generated towards the end of the Absa Currie Cup season appears to throw up a strong retort to the doomsayers who say it is watered down by the absence of Springbok stars.

But often players who do well in the domestic competition get shown up when they are subsequently selected for an overseas tour or graduate to Super 14 level. End of season tours and the Super 14 are an important measuring stick when it comes to assessing the standard of the local game at provincial level.

Trying to measure the quality of the two big Sanzar competitions, the Super 14 and the Tri-Nations, is more problematic.

This is chiefly because two of the three nations who make up Sanzar ban overseas based players from playing for their countries, while South Africa, though the ban has been lifted, are also reluctant to overdo it. So when these teams come up against one another in competition, they tend to all have suffered equally.

New Zealand have lost All Black stalwarts such as Chris Jack and Aaron Mauger, among others, while a whole era of players has been lost to Australia since the World Cup. This turn-over of personnel after the end of a four year cycle building up to a World Cup is something rugby is just going to have to live with, and it is by no means limited to the southern hemisphere.

Had England been sharper at acknowledging the natural turn-over process following a World Cup, that nation may not have plummeted as badly as it did between the last two World Cups. And when you argue that there has been an outflow of stars, you have to also recognise that new ones do emerge.

In 2004 players like Schalk Burger and Fourie du Preez were new and hardly ranked as established stars, but by the end of the season everyone in rugby knew about them and others such as Jean de Villiers. By the end of the year they were every bit as fashionable as rugby players, if not much more so, than the players they replaced who had gone overseas or retired.

Measuring the quality of the rugby in the Super 14 is also not as easy as measuring the quality of the Currie Cup, for if the defensive systems in the Super 14 are lacking, as they sometimes are in the domestic game, then it certainly isn’t apparent. Indeed, the fact that last year’s Currie Cup finalists, the Cheetahs and the Lions, have struggled so much this season is an indication that the Super 14 is still way out front when it comes to regional/provincial competition.

The way I see it, is that upwards of 40 000 people cannot be wrong. The Newlands faithful, who have not numbered below 41 000 for any game this season, have shown over the past five Saturdays that winning is what makes a product marketable.

This is backed up by the converse experience at Loftus, where the Bulls aren’t really playing a brand of rugby inferior to what they employed in the past, but where only 12 000 people pitch up for a big match because the bottom line is that they have not been getting the results their supporters are used to.

Every year the Currie Cup starts off slowly, and then the form teams start to attract large crowds, with their home ground advantage in the final guaranteeing a sell-out for the host union. There are star players who put bums on seats, but ultimately it is the results, and not that hard to measure thing called “quality of the rugby”, that count.