Just finishing reading an article about the 5 things that we learned from the championship and kind of felt bad for Argetina. The boks moaned about isolation but I do feel for the argies. They are normally a really difficult tam and probably played their best game last year to beat the all blacks and draw against the wobblies.
Argentina finally beat the all 3 on the Sanzar teams, but this year with no professional rugby for most of the players and Jaquars being sent to the scrap heap. I only wonder how we can restore the game and help it grow.
Rugby has always been about the national teams, test rugby and then just below it, Super Rugby to give us really close games with the best players from those countries.
Also playing NZ and Aus every year for the past 25 years has become really stale.
But I wonder what would work. So i'm thinking why not use the lattitude and keep teams in roughly the same time zone.
We have the 6 nations for Eurpope, The southern Hemisphere which is ridiculous give the distance and time zone crossing.
So why not break it up into three conferences.
East, Central and West.
East: NZ, Aus, Japan, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa
Central: SA, Eng, Ire, Fra, Wal, Sco, Italia, Romania, Georgia
West: US, CA, Arg, Urugua, Brazil
I know that this is lopped sided to central but it just makes more sense. Now this is what I'm trying to get across.
The European teams had or has the Heineken cup where their best club / provincial teams play one another. The have a local league that ensures the best teams qualify and so it creates a pyramid of moving up but also maintaining grass root rugby.
What I really like is seeing that the US has finally gone professional, their teams seems to get crowds in, they have a good franchise structure.
So right now there are 2 structures, more advance and rich countries tend to go for clubs, like France, Japan and England where as countries that are sparse or fewer players go for provinces. SA, Aus, Ire to name a few.
So why don't argetina join the US and Canada in their MLR with at least 3 professional teams.
I would almost make it a criteria for world cup qualifications or test match qualifications. Unless you have professional teams, invest in your grass routes and can compete in an inter continental / Latitude contest then your team simply don't get a chance to compete either at the world cup or any other tier 1 test matches.
This would remove the one sided nature of world rugby but we would final see the game grow.
I love rugby because it is not football and we get to see at leat 12 test matches a year, but with the demands of club vs country. I simply don't want to go the way of soccer.
