Rugby: Quality control the key

The Blues and Sharks last week provided one of the most intense games of rugby seen for some time. Photo / Getty Images

There is a fair bit of time spent denigrating Super 14, detailing all its supposed ills and flaws.

There's too much travel, not a long enough finals series and it starts too early in the year are the most common themes for complaint.

But then you get a game like the one at Eden Park last week which silences the critics. It was end-to-end, it was high quality, it was intense and it was a reminder that rugby, when it is played well, is a truly compelling spectacle.

What it also showed is that when it comes down it, the travel, the format of the competition, the rules and the referee are only peripheral factors. They are not the root cause of any poor quality games or a flawed competition.

The Blues versus Sharks game proved that, if you have two good teams who stick to their respective scripts for the full 80 minutes and play with the ambition of scoring tries at the top of their agenda rather than stopping them, then you invariably get a good game of football.

It's not so different from food - if you start with the best ingredients, you improve your chances of ending with a better product.

And that is the great worry for the future of Super 14. The real issue is not the final shape of the competition. The issue is whether there is an available supply of quality players to deal with the expansion plans.

The jump from Super 12 to Super 14 caused immediate problems. The arrival of the Force saw the Australian franchises scrap for players and dilute their strength.

The Reds have been awful since 2006 - and they lost significant numbers to the Force. The Brumbies have not been a feature the way they once were and the Force have never lived up to their name.

Only the Waratahs have advanced in Super 14 and Australia have gone from having one excellent province (Brumbies) and two dangerous sides (Waratahs and Reds) to having one very good side (Waratahs), one okay side (Brumbies) and two teams that everyone, even the Lions and Cheetahs, will fancy they can defeat.

In 2006, the year South Africa were granted a fifth side, three of the bottom teams were from the Republic. It was the same in 2007 and last year the Cheetahs and Lions were 13th and 14th respectively.

There is no point in beating about the bush here - neither South Africa nor Australia had the player base to justify expansion in 2006.

The greatest flaw with Super 14 is the lack of quality. There are too many teams who start the competition with no hope of winning and are setting their goals at three victories in the season.

It begs the question - where on Earth are another 30 players going to be found to fill a 15th team as is possible from 2011? If agreement can be reached on the preferred 15-team conferenced format for Super Rugby, Australia will be granted a fifth side.

Quite how they will fill it is being glossed over.

Recently, Australian Rugby Union boss John O'Neill was quizzed on this very issue and said: "There are a lot of Australian players playing overseas that you would work very hard to get back and there are a lot of Pacific Islanders who would prefer to play in Australia and New Zealand - and a lot of them do - instead of playing in Europe, and let them into our competitions.

"Open the door a bit more on foreign players and there's always the rugby league market. I think the overall availability of cattle, if you're a bit imaginative, you could put a very competitive team on the field."

The same thing was said when the Force launched and it proved rather difficult to persuade ex-pat Australians to return. The foreign market is only going to provide a couple of players at most and no one can really believe that Polynesian players are going to come back south in their droves to play for a fifth Australian team that is staring down the barrel most weeks.

As for league, well, they produce league players, who, while battle-hardened and physical, don't actually make overnight success stories when they switch codes.

So it comes back to the same question - where, realistically, are another 30 top-class professionals going to be found?

The real answer is New Zealand. The Australians are already active over here, monitoring schools rugby and the provincial scene with some interest. As the Herald on Sunday revealed a few weeks ago, there are 19 New Zealanders already contracted to Australian sides. We can expect that number to greatly increase in 2011 if there is expansion.

But even raiding New Zealand isn't going to change the fact that already there is not enough quality through the competition to produce the kind of compelling encounter we saw at Eden Park last week.

The Sharks, Bulls, Waratahs, Hurricanes, Blues and, at a stretch, the Chiefs, have the requisite talent to realistically challenge for the playoffs.

When these sides meet it will be worth watching. When they run up against the Lions, Cheetahs, Reds, Highlanders and Force, forget it.

Maybe when they play the Stormers, Brumbies and Crusaders it will be worthwhile, but only maybe. That's not the basis for a successful tournament.

Hopefully the Sanzar boss men watched the Blues play the Sharks and realised it was an epic not for any other reason than the fact there were a lot of good players on the field, they were well coached and determined to win.