South African Rugby Union (SARU) president Oregan Hoskins wants to see a 17-team Super Rugby competition in future with fewer local derbies and an Argentine team in the mix.
The Super Rugby format is set to change from 2016 when a new broadcast deal takes effect and Hoskins would like to see a change from the current 15-team format.
Sport24
In the current format, teams are placed in three groups based on country. While they play overseas teams across the conferences, they play teams from their own country twice on a home and away basis.
Hoskins, in an interview, said he’d like to see the 17 teams play each other in a one-off round-robin format. That would see all teams in the competition face each other with fewer local derbies.
SARU will table Hoskins’ proposal at a SANZAR meeting in Dublin next week.
He feels South African teams are facing each other too often in an already gruelling season. He also said the public interest in local derbies has waned with teams also facing each other twice in the Currie Cup later in the year.
Hoskins said the two teams they’d like to be added are the Kings and a team from Argentina.
Oh how I wish that we could do away with the double rounds of local derbies and rather play against all sides in the competition.
Even if the Competition is expanded to 18 sides, if a single round of local derbies are played and all tems are played, then there will be 17 Open Round games per side, plus a possible 3 further games for the Play-off’s and Final… bringing the total amount of games played by the team (s) playing the most gemes to 20, 12 teams will be playing only 17 games.. 2 teams would play 18 games.
That is about the same as now… now we have each team playing 8 local derbies, 8 matches against the other 2 conferences, so that makes 16 already… plus a possible 3 games for the Play-off’s and Final. So in essense it is 1 game less than in a straight 18 format. In a 17 side format it would be exactly the same as now.
No need for conferences… hell, there is to my mind no need for a Play-off weekend either… just let the top 4 sides fight the Semis and the top 2 the Final!