The Chiefs.
Back to back New Zealand Conference Champions 2013.
Mass euphoria erupts, the celebrations kick off. The NZRU trumpet it proudly to the sporting and wider public with an almighty fanfare and the fireworks are set off. Waikato Stadium get the right to erect banners to commemorate their success. All Chiefs fans bask in the achievement and then settle back to prepare themselves for an assault on overall Super Rugby success.
But back in reality, no one really seems to give a toss, and to my mind this is a failure to truly understand and appreciate the conference system Super rugby has adopted. All that anyone looks at is the combined competition table which, in reality, is just a seeding system for the post season. Until SANZAR, it's constituent bodies and those that report it understand what their competition is and what being a conference champion really is, how can we expect the fans to understand it?
In this Super Rugby competition, winning your conference is of huge importance, and is a significant achievement. It means you've bested the other teams you have to best over months of competition, and are the best of those teams. As a reward, you are guaranteed a spot in the post season playoffs and in a prime position to win the the post season battles with the benefit of home ground advantage for at least one of your matches.
The Chiefs are the New Zealand champions. Well done Chiefs, you are the best team in the country over the period of the regular season. Bar none. Again. Be proud all you people who struggled for so long in the shadows of all our conference competitors, in both this format and previous incarnations (excepting the Hurricanes, but, well, if you're a Hurricane's fan you probably understand where us Chiefs fans are coming from).
Why don't we celebrate this accomplishment? At the conclusion of the match last night at Eden Park, after an unexpectedly heroic performance from a desperately struggling Blues outfit, the Champions of New Zealand were handed their reward for months and months of rugged hard work and sweat and graft, and it was almost an afterthought. Not good enough SANZAR. Shame on you NZRU - recognize your champions and recognize the significance of their achievement.
Now there will be those that will argue that there is only one competition and that it is the big shiny trophy awarded after, usually, 80 minutes hard toil in the final game of the season, and that setting your sights lower (ie at the conference level) is to celebrate mediocrity. I would counter by suggesting that there is almost nothing more difficult than winning your conference. As a result the post season finals series now works out to be, for the Chiefs, two games stacked in their favour because, Little Chief willing, they'll be at home for those two one off games. In a competition where 24 hour flights and twelve hour time zone shifts are the norm, sometimes multiple times for those bucking the odds with away victory, home advantage is worth a huge, huge amount over the finals series. So really, we're handicapping those not good enough to win their conference, and accumulate enough cross conference and/or bonus points, and rightly so. But it means you aren't on a level playing field come the playoffs - whereas winning your conference requires that, by and large, you beat every other of your conference rivals from the same starting spot, over months of brutal competition.
Please don't think I'm holding up the conference champions over the overall competition champion, because that's simply not the case. Winning the whole kumara in the post season is what we all want at the start of the season. It's just that slogging your way to a Conference championship guarantees you the opportunity to go for that shiny kumara, and avoiding the vagaries of the three wild card spots. Even finishing with the third best record of the conference champions means you get to play the worst of those wild card teams in the qualifiers.
Lets look forward to the day we find reasons to celebrate genuine success, rather than writing them off because there are other greater successes to strive for.
So, all you rugby fans out there, and especially you Chiefs fans, take a step back for today to really celebrate the enormous achievement of the Chiefs as back to back champions of our New Zealand Conference. Sing it loud and long; revel in the glory. We are the NEW ZEALAND CHAMPIONS. There will be plenty of time to look forward to pushing for a chance at the ultimate prize next week.
