By drafting all the top players into their teams, Australia and New Zealand are using the Super 12 competition as national trials
RUGBY: Jon Swift
TO the average New Zealander, defeat for the All Blacks in a Test series assumes the same sort of hysteria that the ovine form of mad cow disease would engender across the stretch of the Land of the Great White Cloud.
Certainly the New Zealand provinces — and there are five of them in the Super 12 to four from South Africa and three from Australia — – have loaded up for bear. And, one would suggest, loaded the juries as well.
The paltry two-match suspension meted out to Walter Little for testing positive for the use of a banned substance would tend to indicate that there is more honour, in New Zealand eyes, in winning than there is in caring what the rest of the world thinks.
But then it has always been thus with the All Blacks. They have produced magnificent teams and individual players of enormous stature, but equally they have tended to whine with the consistency of an off-kilter turbo-fan at the slightest hint that things are not going their way.
Witness the mysterious tummy bug which struck the All Blacks in their up-market Sandton hotel prior to the World Cup final. Extra insurance in case of defeat perhaps?
It would have indeed been profligate in terms of time and expense to bring Little back to South Africa for a hearing — he tested positive after the match against Natal last month — but surely, even if as Little claims he only took something for a toothache, someone must be held accountable for more than just a two-match respite.
There is no doubt that the advent of the professional side which has now been grafted on to the game of rugby will bring its share of lawsuits for lengthy banning on dope- related cases. This has proved true in athletics.
But surely, allowing this type of abuse — intentional or not — into the game is indicative of the kind of creeping paralysis which has always marked the deliberations of the International Rugby Board. And surely, they should welcome such lawsuits to both clear the air and establish the ground rules. But again, you are dealing with the IRB here.
One feels that perhaps the New Zealanders who judged and sentenced Little took cognisance of this. Indecision does indeed have some strange side benefits and, as previously noted, winning rugby is almost a religion to the followers of the All Blacks.
It shows in the way they have — quite legitimately — approached the Super 12.
The Antipodeans have effectively used a draft system which has elevated their provincial sides almost to the level of full international teams.
If you do not believe that, how can a team as powerful as Auckland justify bringing Counties superstar Jonah Lomu in as a member of their already massively talented squad?
The answer is quite simple. The New Zealanders and Australians have identified the top players in their respective countries — and not always those with citizenship as the number of Fijian internationals shows — and divided them up among the sides in the competition.
What this means is that every New Zealand or Australian side which takes the field in this Southern Hemisphere championship is, in a way, playing a national trial against the cannon fodder provided by the more strictly demarcated provinces of South Africa.
One would suspect that the turmoil of losing players such as Christian Stewart and Tiaan Strauss would always have led to Western Province battling to stay with the top sides this season. But for them and Transvaal to have done quite as badly as they have in the opening stages of the competition suggests, if you will pardon the analogy, that someone has put a horseshoe in the boxing glove.
The teams our provinces are facng play the game harder and faster than provincial sides — they play it with the intensity and tempo of a full international. It is time we in this country woke up to the realities of what massive aounts of money pumped into a project really mean.
Coming second doesn’t count. And with the triangular Sanzar series between Australia, New Zealand and South Africa looming, this country faces the reality of not even coming in as also-rans — not when the sides they will eventually face have had wall-to-wall trials for their top players against the men they will face in green and gold.