Kick em out for their own good

Kick em out for their own good
Stephen Hodge
Every week we cop it from some white, cauliflower-eared, overweight former Springbok prop who comes down from his farm to whinge about how South Africa’s provincial rugby teams get such a raw deal when playing rugby in Australia and New Zealand in the Super 12 / Super 14 competition. They complain they have to travel more than their competitors in Australia and New Zealand and are disadvantaged by their vastly different time zone. They usually get one team in the semi finals every year or so, but one team out of five isn’t a pass mark by anyone’s standards, especially when the rest of their teams finish near the bottom of the competition ladder. They also whinge about how the monolithic forward-based style of rugby is not suited to the fast-paced, expansive rugby played in by Australian and New Zealand teams. Not surprisingly every year they bitch and moan about how unfair the competition is and how they are going to quit and join the Heinekin Cup, the European provincial rugby competition.

Do they think they can just walk in being banned from international sport for 20 years and tell us how to run our own competition so it suits them?

Scheduling the competition and changing the rules to suit South Africa is certainly not in the interests of Australian rugby. So kick em out of the comp. If they get such a raw deal here, playing somewhere else is bound to be better for them. Where they play is up to them. They can revamp their own domestic competition, the Currie Cup, or play in Europe with its similar style of rugby and time zone.

If they leave we will lose some money for television rights but the benefits outweigh this. At the very least it would stop the whingeing we hear every week across the Indian Ocean. There would automatically be a more-expansive and attractive playing style. We could invite teams from and open up new markets in Pacific Islands of Fiji, Western Samoa and Tonga where rugby already has grass roots. They’re all much closer to home and less likely to whinge. 360 words