Super Bung-Bung

We all knew the new Super Rugby format was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but now we are halfway through the season we now fully understand just how head scratching it is.

Putting aside the ridiculous travel requirements of the new sides, the fact a Tokyo based side needs to play home games against n teams half a continent away in Singapore, and the whole political Kings situation, the real issue is the borked Conference System.

What we have here is not one points table like you get in the NRL, every World Cup in every sport ever,  all football completion etc, we have a completion that uses seven different tables.

Count them.  There are the four conferences themselves, the combined African tables, and the NZ / Aus combined table.  Then there is the overall (you would think most important one) which is there purely to highlight how silly the whole thing is.  And this is what that looks like.

Pos	Team	Points
1	Chiefs	29
2	Stormers	24
3	Lions	22
4	Brumbies	21
5	Crusaders	27
6	Hurricanes	25
7	Highlanders	23
8	Bulls	23
9	Rebels	17
10	Sharks	17
11	Blues	16
12	Cheetahs	12
13	Waratahs	12
14	Reds	8
15	Jaguares	7
16	Force	6
17	Kings	4
18	Sunwolves	3

So the 5th placed team has the second most points, the 6^th placed team has the third most.  The third placed team has fewer points than the eighth placed team.  The same applies to the fourth placed team.  You can see why it is hard to track down these tables.

There is still some good rugby in this competition, and there will be anticipation ahead of the Hurricanes v Chiefs match this weekend.

But it is like a thoughtlessly compile Spotify playlist; there is some good stuff, but no overall context to it all.  A random collection of rugby matches undertaken in a parallel universe framework

It is OK inspite of itself.