Aussies in plot to ditch africans

[slomo]

in todays west a piece by dave hughes, australian and new zealand officials are plotting a replacement super rugby competition excluding south africa and including japan, it goes on to say there fustrated by administrive turmoil and politicisation, the next super 14 season kicks off in little more than 6 months but no one knows which set of rules it will be played under or what the finals format will be due to the delays of sarugby. until agreements have been reached the fixtures cant be finalized, impacting on the australian and nz teams who need to start booking grounds and marketing.

the full article isn't yet up on thewest.com

[oxleymoron]

The inclusion of Japan would probably make more sense for the broadcast partners, as it makes the viewing times for games spread over a smaller timezone period, meaning that there is the potential of more games shown in primetime, rather than watching games from Yarpieland at 2am.

How about we start a thread "Stuff we can blame on the Yarpies?"

[Burgs]

Would be a great shame for the quality of the matches as the SAFFA matches bring a different style of play under the broader SH umbrella however you can understand the NZRU & ARU getting the shits with them.
Also, from looking at the attendence figures for the Force they are by far the "weakest link" in terms of spectator numbers (aside from perhaps valid theories given about SAFFA's being season members etc v Kiwi single match) so more attractive fixturing may be more marketable.
I would hate them to go though.

[James]

Makes you wonder who are there more of in Perth- South Africans or Japanese? The article mentions the big money Japanese clubs would buy out a lot of SA players (who would be presumably choose between Europe and Japan) so perhaps not much would be actually lost. If that did happen the SA fans would hopefully stay while we can add on Japanese ones too. The Japanese are pretty great at getting behind their sports.