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http://www.rugby365.com/tournaments/...ews/500161.htm
Marshall slags not so Super Rugby
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:56
Man of the moment: Justin Marshall
Legendary All Black No.9 Justin Marshall, now playing for Welsh club the Ospreys, reckons the Super 14 is stale in comparison to European competitions.
Marshall said players from the Southern Hemisphere weren't going there for the money, but rather for the excitement of Northern Hemisphere rugby.
Writing in The Observer, Marshall explains that the Heineken Cup, which reaches the quarterfinal stage this weekend with Ospreys travelling to Saracens, is where it's at.
Super Rugby, according to the former Crusader, is a bore by comparison.
"The first thing I liked about [the Heineken Cup] was the was the way the pools were just drawn," the scrumhalf wrote in his column.
"Who you got was purely down to luck, which offered a great deal of excitement and something different for the players.
"I loved that sheer excitement of finding out who you were going to get each year [A seeding system is to be introduced next season].
"The buzz of our quarterfinal at Saracens on Sunday is something I cannot wait for," he added.
It is this buzz and variety that Marshall says gives the Heineken Cup the edge over Super Rugby.
"This is a far superior competition - it is much tougher and it offers up the variety that is terribly missing in the Super 14," he wrote.
"There, you have the same teams and the same players.
"One year you'll be playing at the Bulls and the next you'll have the Bulls at home, but that's about as far as the variety goes.
"If you play 10 years of that as I did it get tedious.
"That is what pushed me away - I just got stale.
"It is a serious problem for the Southern Hemisphere teams, and it extends to the Tri-Nations, where the same players pull on different coloured jerseys and do it all over again.
"That is why viewing figures and attendances are dropping - it is basically New Zealand, Australia and South Africa playing each other for six months of the year, and after a bucket-load of that, people are turning off their televisions," he added.
Marshall his clearly loving it in Wales and is predicting his adopted country to lift the William Webb Ellis trophy in 2011.