Rollo Manning has been a rugby tragic all his life since being named after a Wallaby winger and educated at a private boarding school in Sydney, Australia. Manning has been working in publicity and public relations for 40 years, and during that time has commented on the "game they play in heaven" through radio, magazines and newspaper coverage.
As a correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, he has broadcast in magazine style programs and live coverage of games. He is currently a regular contributor to www.scrum.com and radio shows in his hometown of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Manning has been contributing to eSports for six years and relishes the opportunity to express his views on the first of the two rugbies. He is currently completing work on a study of the inter play between rugby league and rugby union over the past 100 years, when league was formed as the professional arm of an otherwise purely amateur game.
Since 1995, both have become professional and the drift of players is going back from league to union. Where will it end? That is the question Manning is now asking himself.
With just two rounds of Super 14 played in the 2008 competition, it is already evident that the two top New Zealand teams of the past 12 years – the Auckland Blues and the Canterbury Crusaders – will be the teams to beat.
Between them, these two sides have won on nine occasions with the Crusaders top with six wins and the Blues with three. Sitting at number one and two on the 2008 ladder, the two teams have scored a total of 175 points for and 46 against. The Crusaders (66) are just two points ahead of the Blues (64) on for and against point difference.
The next team down, the Sharks, have a nine point difference and the Waratahs are next with 14. Both the Blues and the Crusaders have picked up a bonus point (four + tries) in their opening games showing their dominance at this early stage.
But it is not just the scores, it is the way they play the game.
At a time when world rugby is suffering from a coach-inspired drive for negative play and with the forwards dominating, it is good to see two teams throwing the ball wide and giving their backs a run. In these first two rounds these two top teams have scored a total of 22 tries in their four matches against 38 tries in the total of 14 matches. Fifty-eight percent of tries have come from two teams.
The games played in South Africa in the last day saw the Crusaders down last years champions the Bulls by 54-19, while the Blues turned on a class performance with a 45 point margin win against the Jo'burg based Lions. It is refreshing to see these wins, but credit must go also to the Lions who at no stage changed their game plan to try and close the game down and whenever in possession turned on their own display of running rugby.
Considering the Rugby World Cup final last year between the Springboks and England produced no tries and was hailed by all as a drab affair with calls for changes in the laws to encourage more tries being scored, it is encouraging to see these two teams showing the way. The experimental law variations have admittedly made some difference, but why just these two sides and not the other 12 in the competition. It all comes down to the coach.
The coaches of these two star teams, David Nucifora (Blues) and Robbie Deans (Crusaders), were both applicants for the Wallaby (Australia) coaching job with Deans being successful despite a previous preference for an Australian, such as Nucifora, to hold the post. If Deans can only bring the attacking style of play he has guided the Crusaders with to the Wallabies it could see a resurgence in Australian rugby.
Why Deans did not get the NZ coaching job is a real mystery, especially when the incumbent Graham Henry's failure at the RWC 07 is taken into account. Again it is not just that the All Blacks lost in the quarter final to France it is the way they lost – playing totally negative style of play relying on the forwards to do all the work while the backline (as brilliant as it was) were treated as spectators to the forward pick and drive effort at some times going on for over 20 phases of play and inside the French 22 meters area.
So much the influence of the coach. It is hoped that 2008 will see the coach who encourages open play to be victorious, and the way the Super 14 is shaping up, the more likely this is the case.