Roar Rookie
Joined June 2023
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Assuming the venue for this fixture is indeed secure, Rugby Australia must now carefully consider its options for a team to face the Lions on that date.
Over the past 14 years, the Melbourne Rebels served as an experiment to prove two notions: 1) That Melbourne can sustain a professional rugby…
I’m a fan of that yardstick for the best player debate – ‘Would they have a star in Rugby 08?’
All solid candidates that you have put forward. Valentini is a big omission though, he’s only a season or two away from getting that coveted star in my opinion.
Hope and potential: The Wallabies who can be in the world class conversation
Cheers PB, indeed there are quite a few options in the front row. I would love to have included guys like Faessler, Nongorr and Bell, but I presume they would be rested for the test match matches.
Melbourne Rebels' demise appears to create a hole in the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour schedule - but here's a solution
How many would turn up? 30,000-40,000 Lions fans plus probably a similar amount to what the Rebels contingent would have been I suppose.
Melbourne Rebels' demise appears to create a hole in the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour schedule - but here's a solution
Indeed it is not a very ‘Melbourne friendly’ team, but they do need to use a pretty large stadium. They are expecting about 30,000-40,000 Lions fans travelling to watch these games.
Melbourne Rebels' demise appears to create a hole in the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour schedule - but here's a solution
NM, while I have purposely left out the realistic Wallabies contenders in this line up to have a bit of fun with it, there are no rules stopping them from putting Wallabies squad members in the tour fixtures. During the 2021 Lions Tour, South Africa picked a ‘South Africa A’ team that was basically a proxy for a 4th Test match 😂
Melbourne Rebels' demise appears to create a hole in the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour schedule - but here's a solution
Munro Mike, luckily I identify as an ignorant dingbat 😁
Thank you for including those annual spectacles that are irrelevant the winter club sport calendar. I would hazard a guess that you are Melbourne and do not have an appetite for Rugby Union.
Does the failure of the Rebels prove that rugby has no business in Melbourne?
I wholly agree on the principle of positioning Super Rugby as the icing on the cake. It used to be the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to the Heineken Cup, but over time, it has been devalued tremendously. Though, NZ would rightly insist on keeping Super Rugby the same duration. Fortunately, URC, Top 14 and Premiership show that the Super Rugby does not need to be shorted to accommodate for the domestic comp.
Does the failure of the Rebels prove that rugby has no business in Melbourne?
As a brand, Super Rugby just isn’t what it used to be. People can talk about the standard of rugby all they want; it is an important ingredient, but evidently it is not the be all and end all. Kiwi teams play great rugby in front of relatively empty stadiums too.
All three discussion points that you made are really relevant and also pretty easy areas to improve. For the competition format, taking the top 3 and getting 4 & 5 to play a wildcard match could also be an option. Regional names was a really interesting point; agreed they should definitely bring that back to promote tribalism. You also touched on the timing of the Magic Round – it is such a good concept but scheduling it for Round 2 this year was just pure stupidity.
Super Rugby can be fixed. Here's how
Agreed, Jordan. As you have said in your comments below, there are ways to get out of the mess that we are in, but the notion that our Premier rugby clubs can replace Super Rugby as a national televised product is, unfortunately, a pipe-dream. You have have pointed out all of the indicators of this; the numbers just don’t stack up.
Personally, I do believe that a national competition is the way forward, but not via the Premier Clubs and not as a replacement for SR. Fans have largely tuned out of SR because it lost the prestige that it once had (it had a bloody good until about 2016). IMO, this prestige can be reinstated by positioning the competition differently in the market; Heineken Cup of the Pacific region. Like the Heineken Cup, it should be an esteemed competition that the best franchises in Aus, Nz, Pacifica and Jap need to qualify for, and it can coincide with domestic comp calendars.
The national comp would probably require about 8-10 teams to be taken seriously by fans. i.e. The big 4 (Reds, Tahs, Force, Brumbies) plus Vic, Drua, Moana, and country franchises like NSW Eagles, QLD Heelers. Due to the squad rotation required to keep star players in big 4 fresh for the coinciding SR Comp fixtures, the lesser franchises mentioned above could actually be quite competitive and chalk up the odd upset – they represent a largely neglected (yet vital) part of Australian Rugby culture and will pull a crowd in regional hubs like Toowoomba/Mackay/Dubbo/Tamworth etc.
As a Reds fan, this means that I can tune in for a solid 20+ weeks of club rugby. For most of those games, I am seeing my team, or another Australian team winning matches
and getting some silverware (domestic comp). These are not cheap wins – the standard is still high (albeit slightly less than SR).
The domestic success gives me a huge incentive to tune into SR. Ideally, my team can be a contender in SR, but failure is not going to completely cause me to tune out (which is the cause and effect of the current SR model).
The business case for a national club competition: Bold vision or risky fantasy?