New model

Super Rugby Aotearoa: Round 2

Mar 10, 2021

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Tip-On!

If you want to see one of the most talented backs from last year’s New Zealand Secondary Schools selection in action, you can watch Wellington Academy inside centre Riley Higgins — who could well end up pushing Ngani Laumape for the Hurricanes’ 12 jersey in a few years’ time — crossing for an impressive individual score at the weekend here.

All in-game data per ESPNScrum unless otherwise stated.

Picking winners

While their Round 2 loss at home to the Highlanders will have been dispiriting, it wasn’t all doom and gloom for the Chiefs as they kicked off their 2021 season.

In the backline, Damian McKenzie and Etene Nanai-Seturo sparkled when they got on the ball — making 3 clean breaks on their 22 carries, and beating 20 defenders between them — and, up front, the stock of one of the team’s newest All Blacks continued to rise.

Tupou Vaa'i’s performance in the second row in Hamilton was an incredibly balanced one. With 3 offloads and 10 passes, he displayed the exceptional handling skills that have always been prominent in his game; with 2 defenders beaten on 8 carries, he showed the proactive pre-contact footwork that bagged him a test try against Australia last year. On defence — while he was involved in a failed double hit on Jona Nareki in the build-up to Shannon Frizell’s try — he also completed 10 successful tackles.

The list of locks to have tallied at least 8 passes, carries and tackles in a game, as well as at least 2 offloads and defenders beaten, is short: in the 828 starts by Kiwi second rows in Super Rugby since 2016, Patrick Tuipulotu and Jackson Hemopo — both once each — are the only other players to have done so.

Watching Vaa'i’s performances so far in 2021 — both in preseason and the regular season — would leave you with the impression that he has stepped up a level since last year, and the numbers back this up: in Super Rugby Aotearoa 2020, for comparison, he beat a single defender on his 34 carries and completed only 1 offload.

While even just holding your own at Super Rugby level as a 20-year-old in the tight 5 is impressive in relative terms, those metrics do indicate that his selection for the All Blacks was as much about his potential as his immediate ability to contribute.

And, as the 9th-youngest player — and youngest tight forward —to debut for the All Blacks in the professional era, Ian Foster and his fellow selectors must have adjudged that potential to be significant. Over this 25-year period, 41 players have been capped before their 22nd birthday like Vaa'i — and 27 of them have gone on to make at least 25 test appearances:

The ratio of hits to misses has been pretty impressive throughout this period, but most striking under recent regimes was the intent to give those identified early a sustained opportunity to prove themselves at the top level.

Of the 18 players given debuts at age 21 or younger by Graham Henry or Steve Hansen, Dalton Papalii — still a current All Black — is the only one not to have reached 10 tests. (Zac Guildford and Charles Piutau are the only 2 others not to have reached 20.)

With Foster in some ways a continuity appointment, it will be interesting to see if he continues with this approach to selection; in Vaa'i, Cullen Grace and Caleb Clarke, he gave test caps to 3 players who fall into this category in his first year in charge.

One of the youngsters blooded by Hansen in his own first year as head coach was Brodie Retallick — now a veteran of 81 tests, and soon to be returning to mentor Vaa'i at the Chiefs. While Vaa'i didn’t have the same impact at international level in his rookie year as Retallick did, on his current trajectory he may end up being as important to the All Blacks in the 2020s as his future locking partner was in the 2010s.

Foreign fields

Last weekend, there were 115 Kiwis playing in top-level competition overseas:

Loose threads

In case you missed it on Twitter this week

Jordie Barrett putting a goal-line drop-out to good use in Christchurch

Quick hits

More good news this week for the prospective 12-team Super Rugby competition that is intended to kick off in 2022: Stuff reports that New Zealand Rugby has agreed on a workable model for the hypothetical distribution of broadcast revenues to Moana Pasifika and the franchise to be based in Fiji. The framing of this news, however, raises the question of the competition’s overall governance structure — Rugby Australia, who are also meant to be providing 5 teams to the competition, are noticeably absent from this particular story. The picture is still quite opaque on this front, although SANZAAR, via CEO Brendan Morris, has expressed interest in serving as the administrator of the new competition — a move that would provide some continuity of structure, despite half of its constituent members not taking part:
“For 2021 we've got an agreement in place with the unions where Sanzaar will act as an independent management company for [Super Rugby Aotearoa and Super Rugby AU] and trans-Tasman. As conversations progress we'd like a seat at the table to offer our services.”
Forward movement on the long-term shape of the Super Rugby competition may have been one of the factors that encouraged New Zealand Rugby to finally commit to offering perpetual operating licences to their 5 franchises. Crusaders chief executive Colin Mansbridge was one of the critics of the previous time-limited model, which reduced the attractiveness of the clubs to private investors and commercial partners:
“It was a marginal financial model and there's been quite a bit of tension around where certain commercial rights reside. Most clubs have made virtually no money for a decade, and the whole Super system at the club level has been break even for about a decade. We [Super teams] said let’s see if we can change the model.”
Mansbridge’s Crusaders are the one franchise that has immediately signed a new licence, with others expected to follow imminently according to Stuff’s reporting.
In his weekly column for RNZ, Jamie Wall raised the possibility of creating a Super Rugby Wāhine Toa competition to fill the gap in the schedule of the elite women’s game left by the postponement of the 2021 Rugby World Cup:
“The leverage that the women's games would get through the established Super Rugby brands would be immense, especially among younger fans. The key, like for the men, is talent concentration across a smaller number of teams.”
Whether or not a women’s equivalent to Super Rugby Aotearoa is a route that New Zealand Rugby would consider, we should expect to hear more from the union on their plans for the country’s top women this year — at the very least, upon the publication of their annual report for 2020, when they will be required to assess their performance against their official objectives for the calendar year. One of last year’s objectives was stated pretty clearly:
Women’s XVs competition launched – venue and broadcast arrangements are finalised, MOU terms agreed, players and team management are identified
The role of the fullback in attack can be one of the clearest indications of a team’s strategy with the ball, and in recent interviews with The XV two young playmakers provided more evidence of how the 15 shirt is viewed at the top of the men’s game in New Zealand. Zarn Sullivan of the Blues — a natural fly-half — told Tom Vinicombe:
“I guess I just look at fullback as another 10 that can play full field anywhere, really. There’s not much difference between 15 and 10, it’s pretty seamless to be honest. I just look at the fullback as another pivot player, so I slot in where I can. If our 10’s not there in the backline, I know I can put my foot forward and stand where I need to be.”
The Hurricanes’ Ruben Love, who is comfortable across the backline, expressed a similar view:
“The roles and the principles of both 10 and 15 are much the same. Just, I guess, the positioning on some of the plays and having a bit more freedom to express yourself with ball in hand and stuff like that are the kind of attributes I see in a fullback’s game. Both positions have the same principles.”
In his role of Director of Rugby at Toyota Verblitz, Steve Hansen has been grooming a young Kiwi coach for a move back to his homeland — or developing the next person to take over the Waratahs, depending on which of the club’s world-class back-rowers you speak to. While Simon Cron told the Sydney Morning Herald last week that he’d be open to a move back to the struggling Australian franchise (where he was an assistant until 2019), former All Blacks captain Kieran Read insists that — contrary to Michael Hooper’s hopes — Hansen is plotting an eventual return to New Zealand for his protégé. Regardless of which side of the Tasman he ends up on, it’s clear that Cron (who is from a family full of top-level coaches) has been earmarked for a “big future”.
The Blues haven’t had the most conventional of bye weeks, spending the week after their Round 1 match in Cambridge as a result of the Level 3 lockdown in Auckland. While the Covid-19 situation in the city has improved, at the time of writing it is still unclear whether or not Eden Park will be able to admit fans for their game on Sunday. An empty stadium may affect the franchise particularly acutely on the field: research suggests that the magnitude of a team’s home advantage increases with crowd size — and the Blues’ average reported attendance of 34,333 in Super Rugby Aotearoa 2020 was comfortably the highest of any team.
The Chiefs are the first franchise to name their U20 squad for 2021, ahead of the inaugural Super Rugby U20 Tournament to be held in Taupō in April. Some names to look out for are: props Mason Tupaea (brother of Quinn) and Havila Molia from last year’s New Zealand Secondary Schools selection; outside backs Gideon Wrampling and Jona Mataiciwa, who were involved with the senior squad over preseason; and versatile back Te Paea Cook-Savage, who was a standout in Waikato club rugby last year. Hamilton BHS halfback Noah Hotham (now apparently with the Highlanders) and New Plymouth BHS first five Jack Parker (now in the Crusaders Academy, like fellow NPBHS alumnus Blair Murray) are two 2020 school-leavers from the region who are notable absentees; however, the loss of Parker is mitigated by the pick-up of Latrell Smiler-Ah Kiong, a highly-rated fly-half who was with the Hurricanes last year.
Crusaders fans might be anxious about the state of Richie Mo'unga’s left knee — heavily strapped at Orangetheory Stadium on Sunday, and again at training early this week — but assistant coach Scott Hansen communicated to the media that there was no underlying medical issue and that “[i]t hasn’t influenced his performances”. Were there an injury that wasn’t being disclosed, we might expect to see this show up in his running game — and can look for signs of it in match data. So far in 2021, he has beaten 4 defenders on 14 carries (a rate of 1 every 3.5) and made 1 clean break; in Super Rugby Aotearoa 2020, for comparison, on 76 carries he made 11 clean breaks (1 every 6.9) and beat 35 defenders (1 every 2.2). This is obviously a tiny sample size from which it’s not yet worth drawing any meaningful questions, but they are metrics to keep an eye on over the course of the season if rumours sustain.
Shannon Frizell grabbed another try for the Highlanders in their win over the Chiefs on Friday, continuing his remarkable scoring record at Super Rugby level. With a total of 17 in 2,126 minutes played for the franchise, his strike rate of 0.6 tries per 80 minutes compares very favourably to those of the competition’s most dangerous outside backs.
While Riley Higgins did score an impressive try for Wellington, Hawke’s Bay took out the win in the final game of the Hurricanes region’s inter-academy series for 2021. The franchise will pick their own squad for the upcoming Super Rugby U20 Tournament from these fixtures, and it will be interesting to see whether the Hawke’s Bay players who are still at school — Cooper Flanders of Hastings BHS (brother of Devan), Kere Penitito and Brad Campbell of St John’s College and Bethel Malasia of Napier BHS — are considered for selection up an age-grade. Auckland scrum-half Taufa Funaki is one player who has played U20 rugby as an U18 in recent years, turning out for the Blues’ side while still at Sacred Heart College in 2018.