The fixtures for next year’s Americas Rugby Championship have been announced in the last while. The tournament will be contested by Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, United States and Uruguay.
The tournament which will be played around the same time as arguably the best supported international tournament outside the World Cup, the Six Nations, on a similar basis with each team playing 5 games.
The 1st Round of the Americas Rugby Championship will take place on the 1st weekend in February while the 5th and final Round of action is scheduled for the 1st weekend in March.
There will be some interesting questions that will need to be answered by Argentina in particular and it remains to be seen, considering the stature of the majority of their opponents, how seriously they will take the competition.
The last 2 Rounds of the Championship take place at the same time as the 1st 2 Rounds of the revamped Super Rugby tournament. One assumes that Argentina will be going all out to make a good impression during their debut Super Rugby season and they stand a good chance, at the very least, of making the knockout stages.
Will Argentina use the 1st few Rounds of the Americas competition as warm-up games for their Super Rugby squad or will they use 2 completely different squads for these tournaments? This is certainly going to test their player resources. For example during the last weekend in February and the 1st weekend in March they will need to field front rows of sufficient quality on different continents. This means having at least 8 props for the match day squads, and if you consider at least another 2 in each of the travelling squads then that means they need a dozen good quality props.
Does Argentina have the resources to adequately fulfil both of these commitments? It feels as if they may be expanding a little too much too soon. Player fatigue may be an issue by the end of the season, especially considering there is the not too small matter of The Rugby Championship which follows Super Rugby. Remember this will the year after a taxing World Cup in which they played as many games as the finalists and also faced the Barbarians albeit with a somewhat altered squad. It is hard not to get the feeling that they will end up reconsidering their current stance on the non-selection of some overseas based players for the national side sooner rather than later.
At the end of it all money talks loudest which is another reason for me that although Super Rugby is essentially a club competition and Americas Rugby Championship an international one that Argentina will concentrate the bulk of their efforts in Super Rugby. It is not clear who will be broadcasting the Americas Rugby Championship but surely the broadcast deal from Super Rugby will be a bigger one for Argentina.
Another side of the discussion hinges around what the Americas Rugby Championship could eventually mean for the big spending clubs in the Northern Hemisphere. However, this may be the subject of a future article partly due to time constraints but mainly due to us not being certain of whether the usual international protocol of clubs having to make their players available to their countries will apply to the tournament next year.
Americas Rugby Championship 2016 Fixtures:
Round 1 – Weekend of 6 – 7 February 2016
- USA vs Argentina
- Canada vs Uruguay
- Chile vs Brazil
Round 2 – Weekend of 13 – 14 February 2016
- USA vs Canada
- Argentina vs Chile
- Brazil vs Uruguay
Round 3 – Weekend of 20 – 21 February 2016
- USA vs Chile
- Canada vs Brazil
- Uruguay vs Argentina
Round 4 – Weekend of 27 – 28 February 2016
- Brazil vs USA
- Argentina vs Canada
- Chile vs Uruguay
Round 5 – Weekend of 5 – 6 March 2016
- Uruguay vs USA
- Chile vs Canada
- Brazil vs Argentina