For the pundits who predicted this year would be when New Zealand’s stranglehold on world rugby started to slip, results from the early rounds of Super Rugby must make for grim reading.
The All Blacks became the first team to win successive World Cups last year, but with a raft of senior players retiring, including all-time greats Richie McCaw and Dan Carter, some thought they would struggle to maintain that dominance.
The Wallabies’ run to the World Cup final under Michael Cheika also boosted Australian rugby hopes that New Zealand’s days were numbered, with some local media predicting this year would be “the year of the Wallaby.”
Photo: AFP
However, judging by the dominance of New Zealand sides in the early exchanges of this year’s Super Rugby competition, the gap remains as wide as ever.
Teams from New Zealand occupy four of the top-six positions in the Australasian group after the first six weeks of competition. The ACT Brumbies are second on the table by virtue of being the Australian conference leaders.
However, the two-time champions would only be fourth in the group, and fifth overall, going by total points.
The Waikato Chiefs lead the competition with 24 points after five wins and a defeat from six games, with the Brumbies on 17 points after four victories and two losses.
The Otago Highlanders are on 22 points and the Canterbury Crusaders, who have a game in hand, are on 18.
South Africa’s Stormers lead the African group on 18 points after five games in the competition, which has been expanded to 18 teams this year, with sides from Japan and Argentina included for the first time.
The New Zealand sides have not missed a beat, despite the retirements of several world-class veterans, as other players have stepped up to make their mark.
While English media have been basking in England’s Six Nations Grand Slam and already talking of potential World Cup victory in 2019, the performances of New Zealand teams in Super Rugby have given some pause for thought.
“The stark fact is that New Zealand are showing no signs at all of relaxing their rugby stranglehold,” the Daily Mail’s Chris Foy wrote last week. “The dominance could go on and on.”
Australian media boldly predicted this year would be the Wallabies’ year, despite their 34-17 defeat to the All Blacks in last year’s World Cup final.
“The Wallabies ... are a team on the rise, led by a coach in Michael Cheika who demands high standards and expects results,” Australian Web site Fox Sports wrote late last year. “So, 2016 is the year of the Wallaby.”
However, of the combined 11 victories recorded by the five Australian sides so far this year, only one came against a team from New Zealand, the Brumbies beating the Wellington Hurricanes in the opening round of fixtures.
The only other “foreign” side to record a victory over a team from New Zealand came in round two when South Africa’s Lions stunned the Chiefs in Hamilton.
The Chiefs’ 48-23 victory over the Brumbies in Canberra last weekend should have been of the most concern for Australian rugby’s powerbrokers.
Dave Rennie’s side were playing their fourth game in a fourth different country in four weeks, having beaten the Kings 58-24 in South Africa, the Jaguares 30-26 in Argentina and the Force 53-10 in New Zealand.
However, they showed no sign of weariness and defeated Brumbies 48-23 in the Australian capital.
Wallabies coach Cheika downplayed the importance of the early Super Rugby form and said he was more interested in how individual players were performing rather than the teams.
“That seems to be the consensus, that our teams are well behind theirs [New Zealand’s],” Cheika told reporters in Sydney this week. “I’m not looking at how a team performs.”
“What I need to do is see who is going well within our teams, what combinations are going well, who needs to improve and trying to get the best at putting that together,” he said.
His All Blacks counterpart Steve Hansen is reaping the rewards from forward planning as he begins the task of preparing for this year’s Test calendar and the next World Cup cycle.
“We are not going to put a new All Blacks side on the field,” Hansen told the New Zealand Herald this week.
“We are not starting from scratch,” he said. “We tried to plan for the future [from 2012 through last year], so we don’t consider ourselves to be in a rebuilding phase.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier