Former Manu Samoa No 10 and freelance rugby scribe Campbell Burnes contends that Moana Pasifika is just what Super Rugby needs.
By the time you read this, the 12 Super Rugby Pacific squads will be named and most will be gearing up for pre-season training (Covid-19 permitting, of course).
Kickoff is set for February 18, so let us hope and pray a trans-Tasman bubble is open, if not a bubble with both Samoa and Fiji.
There are myriad teething issues which will cloud this revamped competition, but let us focus firstly on the positives.
The advent of Moana Pasifika and Fijian Drua is welcome and long overdue (26 years overdue, some would say). This will give aspiring young Pacific Island pros a team that is close to home from which to launch their careers. It could be a game-changer for the often beleaguered tier two nations of Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. They will be able to choose many of their national players, not from faraway France or England, but from a high-level competition on their doorsteps.
Moana Pasifika’s original aim was to have 30 of a squad from 38 eligible for Samoa or Tonga. A noble aim, indeed. The reality is that New Zealand’s five franchises cannot take all the young Pacific Island talent on the fringes, so many head north to lucrative contracts but ones which lock them into a global calendar that shoehorns international rugby into July and November windows. They are knackered after 2-3 years of this, which is why you only see Samoa, Fiji and Tonga at anything remotely like full strength every four years at Rugby World Cups.
It looks like Auckland will be the base for Moana Pasifika and Australia the base for Fijian Drua. The latter did win the NRC in Australia back in 2018, while we have had a taste of Moana Pasifika already with a 2020 fixture against the Maori All Blacks.
There are concerns from the Blues around how the greater Auckland area will be able to house two Super Rugby franchises. I’m not convinced those fears are well-founded but we will see when crowds, hopefully, flock in 2022.
The bigger issue is how many top PI players plying their trade in the north will be prepared to take substantial pay cuts to come down and take their chance in these new entities. How competitive will they be? More than the Sunwolves, we hope. But the Sunwolves engendered strong support in Japan. Pity they could not win more games.
Happily, Super Rugby Pacific will have a points table with integrity, with teams ranked 1-12 and not reliant on the convoluted conference system which bedevilled Super Rugby from 2016-20. That said, why do we need a playoffs format that includes quarter-finals? Surely just those ranked 1-4 should qualify for the playoffs? Under the current regulations, just four teams will miss the post-season, as they call it. There should be no room for mediocrity. If you lose more games than you win, you should not be anywhere near a playoffs match. That is the NRL’s preserve and why the Warriors are perennially never ruled out of playoffs contention until very late.
But would it not be heart-warming if both Moana Pasifika and the Drua cracked the playoffs in year one?
Great teams are not made in one season, but this is a starting point, and an exciting one at that.