Few star attractions make Super Rugby in 2017 a tough sell | Matt Cleary

Super Rugby, you could argue, in terms of speed and skill and power, and any number of different markers, has never been better. Rugby, like everything, evolves and improves – either gradually, or seismically when a Jonah Lomu turns up, or you can lift in the lineout, things like that. Yet Super Rugby doesn’t feel like it’s better. Rather, the Super Rugby competition is a bit uninspiring.

The 2017 season starts on Thursday night, when the Rebels and Blues meet at AAMI Park, but there’s some chance you didn’t know that, such is the lack of fanfare about the competition.

Australian rugby boasts within its ranks big draw cards, but they’re spread thinly throughout the Super competition, or playing in France or in Japan. When Super Rugby was humming, Australia had three provinces, rugby league was in a flux of greed and hate, and the blazer brigade who ran the once amateur game worked out that money should be spread among the “players” if you wanted to keep them.

For they are, after all, the stars of the show.

Now, not to gaze through rose-tinted glasses because the world is how it is, but pick a year Australian rugby was strong. Let’s say 2002. Stephen Larkham would ghost through defences like Mandrake, a long streak of pelican poop with a hard, hyper-competitive edge. Tim Horan was like a little speed-boat, churning up Ballymore, burning the opposition.

Jason Little, Ben Tune, Joe Roff – athletes, runners, beautiful movers. Nathan Grey ran hard, tight lines into the meat. George Gregan was just hard, and tight. Throw Chris Latham and Matt Burke into the mix and you’ve got a super-fine backs division.

In the pigs, Owen Finegan scored rumbling tries off Gregan flicks. Toutai Kefu was Willie Ofahengaue redux, even as far as a punch-up in a World Cup quarter-final with an ill-advised Irishman. And George Smith and Phil Waugh went at breakdown ball like frenetic giant man-beavers.

And there was the incomparable Eales. John Eales – goal-kicker, athletic lineout leaper, great leader. He could do anything, and regularly did.

And all these stars played against each other in a tight, three-month, 11-round season with two semi-finals and a final. The season started on 27 February and finished on 31 May. Then we’d talk about who should be picked for Australia. Everyone else went to their clubs in Sydney, Brisbane or Canberra.

And that was it.

Today, the competition starts and stops. There are Tests in the middle of it. There’s a ladder with 18 teams on it. There’ll be an Australian team in the finals, whatever happens. There are two “groups”, two African conferences, a team from Japan and a team from Argentina, and an eight-team finals series of winners and wildcards.

That’s a lot to take in. And a lot of teams and a lot of players. But that’s not to say there aren’t super players at Super franchises. Michael Hooper, for one. Put that guy on a treadmill with a giant Energizer bunny, and Hooper would kill the rabbit. Lock Adam Coleman, a destroyer of rucks, is another. I want to see Sefanaia Naivalu rumbling about and Sean McMahon tearing in. And there’s mighty Israel Folau, muscled thighs glistening like the forequarters of a golden ox, the best man under the high ball since Roger Gould.

But that’s about it. Now, I like Nick Phipps, but he has his flaws as a player. Will Genia is Australia’s best 9 but he’s in France. He comes back to play for Australia sometimes, and that’s nice, but otherwise it’s the super-fit and kelpie-enthusiastic but hardly outstanding Phipps. And each week Phipps goes head-to-head with Nick Frisby and Matt Lucas and other halfbacks I’d struggle to pick from a police line-up if they robbed the local Westpac.

Stephen Moore is a top hooker, the fulcrum of a scrum that is emasculated when he’s not in it. As captain of Australia he’s the figurehead and spokesman for the greater brand of rugby, the face of the brand, but he’s got the charisma of a concrete besser block.

Elsewhere there are players who would be pulling on first class jumpers for Randwick Colts in 2002, Western Force have struggled for any kind of form, and there is a third tier comp more anonymous than ultimate frisbee. Club rugby has suffered and disenfranchisement is in the air.

And that’s before you even venture out to see a game live at a venue where it takes 30 minutes to buy an over-priced cup of mid-strength beer. And thus many “grassroots” rugby fans would prefer to drink a tinnie on the grass and watch the Marlins play the Woodies on Manly Oval on an autumn afternoon than trek to Homebush to be taken advantage of by ANZ bank.

Provincial, “franchise” rugby lacks the all-important visceral thing that NRL and AFL fans know in their very corpuscles – tribalism. They don’t call it that – they just live it. They care about the jumper. It represents them. Eastern suburbs, northern beaches, tropical FNQ – that’s our jumper, that’s our place.

So what to do? It’s a difficult one. What can you do in the face of 24/7 TV sport’s rapacious need for “content”? Australian rugby has five franchises and a third tier competition neither of which would be sustainable were it not for TV sport’s multi-millions predicated on Australia having five franchises and a third tier competition.

Can they cut a team or two? Streamline things? Go back to the future? The players association, for one, says no. “Maximising elite opportunities for players and enhancing our state programs is the best strategy to fight the international player drain and develop our depth for Super Rugby and Wallaby competitiveness,” Dean Mumm, the RUPA president, says.

And he can make a case. But the comp still lacks stars. And each week there are 115 Australian Super Rugby players going around, and if you can name 15 of them, congratulations, you’re a fan. Everyone else is having the same trouble with the Westpac bank heist.