Due to a combination of time restraints and atmospheric conditions, this week's Midweek Fixture will fall back on a favourite. To celebrate the All Blacks 15th successful Tri Nations/ Rugby Championship campaign I bring you (drum roll)...
15 things I Learned From The Rugby Championship.
1. The All Blacks have no worthy Southern Hemisphere peer. This much is clear. The 2017 triumph, confirmed before the final round of matches kicked off, was their 15th title in 22 championships (for convenience sake, the Tri Nations will also be referred to as the Rugby Championship), an astonishing sequence of dominance. The longest New Zealand rugby have been without the trophy in their plywood cabinet is two years, when Australia won it in 2000 and 2001 or, put another way, when Jordie Barrett was four.
2. That dominance is only getting more pronounced and that cannot be healthy. Since the tournament increased to four teams with Argentina's inclusion from 2012, the All Blacks' win rate has increased from a healthy 69.4 per cent to an otherworldly 90.9 per cent. If you combined Australia, South Africa and Argentina's table points from this year's tournament (29), they'd beat the All Blacks by one. If you combine them since 2012 they equal 173, the All Blacks themselves have accrued 143. This is not written as a smug fan, but as an illustration of what a procession the tournament has become.
3. Which does not make them immune to one-off upsets. The Wallabies were a minute from beating the All Blacks in Dunedin and the Springboks fought hard in Cape Town, but you could make a convincing argument that the scoreline flattered the defeated in both cases. The blowouts in Sydney and Albany were probably more reflective of the gulf between the sides. Still, project forward to World Cup knockout matches and you can see why you'd be stupid to take any match for granted.
4. The choices of All Black home venues were interesting and possibly instructive. Obviously the scheduling of the Lions impacted heavily on Rugby Championship planning so I'll reserve judgement on this until next season but I have serious doubts a Rugby Championship match would sell out Eden Park or Westpac Stadium until the competition becomes a little more competitive again.
5. TRC has hurt Argentina more than it's helped... sad. The inconvenient truth is that Argentina might have been better off as an unloved outlier, developing its own style and systems based on who and what they had available to them at the time. Having Argentina admitted to the Championship and Argentina-lite into Super Rugby has promoted a homogeneity that - on resources alone - will always see them struggle to match the other three countries. Until there is more than one meaningful professional side below test level in Argentina, Los Pumas are doomed and, sadly, better off with their best players scattered around Europe.
6. Rugby has gone card crazy. This is written by a committed advocate of player safety, too. Damian de Allende's red in Cape Town was just a culmination of what appears to be a trend: ref's reaching for the pocket as a default setting rather than a genuine reflection of the sin that has been committed. Speaking to a top whistleblower this week, he was of the belief that only Nigel Owens appears comfortable enough in his skin to ref as he sees it; the others are too intent on reffing the game how they think their bosses at World Rugby might want to see it.
7. We're no closer to public unanimity on who the best No 7 is, though my thoughts have firmed. Sam Cane's combination of size and work rate do it for me and his occasional hands-of-stone moments are offset by his ferocious tackling and breakdown work. Ardie Savea remains the perfect bench ingredient while Matt Todd, a terrific player by any measure, is destined to be the Paul Henderson of his generation.
Kieran Read makes a tackle during the All Blacks win over the Springboks. Photosport
8. Kieran Read is quietly becoming NZ's most under-appreciated legend. He's played 105 tests scored 23 tries and done all sorts of awesome yet his name doesn't resonate like a Richie McCaw or a Dan Carter. This might change by the end of 2019 when it is to be presumed that injury permitting, he will at least give considerable thought to retiring. Read doesn't play the glamour edge role that he did four or five years ago but he has tuned his game differently. Nobody won more lineouts than Read (26) this season and his 56 tackles were bettered only by a quartet of flankers - Sean McMahon, Cane, Michael Hooper and Pablo Matera - and Sonny Bill Williams. His ball-carrying stats were not too shabby either. It's hard to say if captaincy rests easily upon his shoulders but you have to remember that McCaw's leadership was being questioned well into his tenure.
9. Aaron Smith is lapping the field when it comes to Steve Hansen's choices at halfback. TJ Perenara still runs hot and cold off the bench and the options below those two seem so unpalatable that the selectors have kept the nuggety, but departing, Tawera Kerr-Barlow in the squad. The cynic in me says this reason more than any other is why Smith's lying to his bosses over toilet trouble (see No 13) will be dealt with more leniently than if it was, say, Seta Tamanivalu.
10. Beauden Barrett is still the boss at 10. There were a few question marks around his form, particularly after a poor test on home ground in New Plymouth. But let's strip emotion out of it and deal with cold, hard numbers. There were four principal first-fives in the championship by minutes played: Barrett (413 minutes), Bernard Foley (480), Elton Jantjies (437) and Nicolas Sanchez (355). Barrett carried the ball 65 times, the next closest was Foley (47). Barrett made nine clean breaks, the next closest was Foley (4). Barrett beat 20 defenders, the next closest was Foley (10). His four offloads were bettered only by Foley (6) but his seven try assists were well ahead of Foley's four. Barrett made 36 tackles and missed just five; Foley made 37 and missed 13; Jantjies made 36 and missed 11; Sanchez made 35 and missed 15. Perhaps surprisingly, Barrett's 81.3 per cent success rate with the boot compares well with Foley (78.9), Jantjies (81.3) and Sanchez (78.9), though you could point out that the All Blacks are more likely to turn down difficult penalties than other sides. Whatever way you look at the numbers, it is hard to draw any conclusion that even when Barrett is not at his best, he's still a hell of a lot better than anybody else.
Barrett is not at his best, he's still a hell of a lot better than anybody else. Photosport
11. Sky's the limit. The pay-TV broadcaster's grip on rugby could be under threat from internet giants Amazon and possibly telco Spark when negotiations reopen next year for Sanzaar content post-2021. As for this year, the Herald understands that while viewer hours for the Rugby Championship is slightly up, the actual number of viewers is static or down on last year. This is likely to be a combination of decreasing subscriber numbers and points 1 and 2 on this list.
12. After a Lions series that felt overwrought, it was nice to see that the Rugby Championship didn't devolve into the Battle of the Coaches a la the increasingly boring Hansen v Gatland trope. Even Michael Cheika seemed more measured than usual, though the cap was close to blowing off his internal radiator in Dunedin.
13. Having said that, the tournament lacked enthralling storylines. Which made the opening match in Sydney all the more remarkable. Not only was there a match to live up to the game-of-two-halves cliché, with the All Blacks leading by an astonishing 40-6 at the break before stumbling home 54-34, but the most-read previews focused on the off-field peccadilloes of senior players Aaron Smith and Jerome Kaino. The woman at the centre of Smith's Christchurch toilet tryst from a year earlier released messages between her and the halfback that suggested the liaison was far from a one-off as he had claimed and also suggested a clumsy attempt at a cover up. Kaino flew home before the test after Australian paper the Daily Telegraph outed him for an affair with a Canberra model. It prompted a revealing statement from NZ Rugby CEO that did more than hint that the old "rules" of touring no longer applied and that current and future All Blacks would be held to higher standards than their predecessors: "We certainly understand that our game and our players are under public scrutiny and these latest stories are concerning... While NZR does not wish to comment on individual behaviour, it is clear that this is really hurting rugby, all the people concerned, our fans and supporters."
14. Rainbow tick for the ARU. With Australians forced into a ludicrous plebiscite on same-sex marriage (just do it already Australia, for heaven's sake), it was heartening to see major sports codes, like Australian rugby, take a lead and endorse marriage equality. Injured flanker David Pocock also offered staunch support via Twitter for the rights of gays to marry, while teammate Israel Folau said he'd be voting 'no', in line with his religious beliefs. Now, I might think those religious beliefs are bunkum, easily disabused and more persuasive evidence as to the Christian church's waning relevance in modern society, but I respect Folau's right to set out his stall on the issue.
15. Whither now, SBW? This is a curious one. Sonny Bill Williams could make all his tackles, pilfer ball at the breakdown, scoop one-handed offloads all over the park to set up breaks, crash the ball over the line and still there'd be a big chunk of the population who think he was the worst player on the field. As it was, he didn't do all those things, making the life of his critics just that much easier. He was defensively strong and busy, but on offence things just didn't click and the logical conclusion is he's either been figured out by opposition coaches or he is just not the physical beast he was even a couple of years ago. For the first time there seems to be genuine doubt whether he can drag those big bones of his to Japan in two years. He needs a big end-of-year tour to ease the selectors' minds.
As you read this I will be in a small vehicle, a Toyota Yaris no less, heading south to my hometown of New Plymouth to watch the start and hopefully not end, of Taranaki's sixth Ranfurly Shield era. There are several reasons I feel compelled to do this, all of which you will be able to read in my retrospective diary of the day, which should hit this site somewhere around lunchtime tomorrow.
THE WEEK IN MEDIA ...
I love these clips of the crowd at a Florida Gators home match at Gainesville - Tom Petty's hometown - belting out I Won't Back Down during a break in play. RIP Tom.
Jake LaMotta, the subject of Raging Bull, arguably the greatest sports movie ever made, died last month. Here is a torrid Inside Sports profile on him from 1981 that resurfaced recently.
