FEATURE How are Australian sides faring in Super Rugby Pacific?

Eight rounds down, seven more to come, and all 12 Super Rugby Pacific teams will have had their mid-season bye after this weekend’s Round Nine. It’s the chance for teams to reset and players to recuperate, and it’s also the best point in the year to hand down a mid-term progress report.

With six more games to play for some teams, seven more for most, the back half of the season represents the chance to make good amounts of change without quite overhauling everything, to start tuning up for the run to the finals, or in some cases, to just start hoping like hell that fortunes will change.

More than anything, this mid-point of the season is a reminder to all and sundry that the Super Rugby Pacific competition is way too short. For the Australian players who won’t be required for international duty in 2024, they could be just two months away from going back to club rugby.

But bemoaning Australia’s professional rugby structure is another argument for another day – in the here and now, how are the five teams tracking this season?

Trending up – ACT Brumbies and Melbourne Rebels

This isn’t going to be a ranking method based on anything overly scientific, because in these types of subjective exercises, gut feel and instinct about a team back in February is generally a pretty good starting point.

Before a ball was kicked in anger, I had the Brumbies and Rebels pencilled in for decent seasons, but certainly not top-four by the mid-point ‘decent’.

But they sit third and fourth with six and five wins respectively, and in the case of the Rebels, it represents the first time in their existence that they have played themselves into this position by this point of the year. They are quite likely one win from locking down a place in the Super Rugby finals, which is also something they’ve not done in a full season unaffected by a global pandemic.

Considering everything that’s going on in the background, their recent run of three straight wins – and especially the way they’ve gone about it – is a huge credit to the playing group and their coaching team led by Kevin Foote. They have strengthened their squad in certain positions, and those moves are paying dividends.

The Brumbies, I figured, might not be able to cover for the loss of some key experienced personnel, but that was disproven within the first few rounds, and it’s clear I under-estimated the progression rates of young players in their system. There’s no better example than exciting No.8 Charlie Cale, but you could also point to the way they’ve more than adequately covered the losses of Andy Muirhead and Len Ikitau over the last month, and Allan Ala’alatoa all season to date.

Depth is something Brumbies have enjoyed in recent years and it’s impressive again in 2024. But depth is something the Rebels have now genuinely gained, and it will determine how high up the standings they finish this season. Both are well placed to finish the home and away rounds well.

As expected – Queensland Reds and NSW Waratahs

It was always going to be about how well Queensland could recover from the loss of tighthead tyro Taniela Tupou in putting them down for a mid-table finish in 2024, and that certainly remains the case. Their back-row trio was in excellent form through the first five or six weeks, and that certainly helped, but their scrum remains a work in progress.

Les Kiss is still trying to settle on his best backline combination too, where there are several players with Wallabies caps who on current form look a way off adding to their tally.

They will also have to tackle the next few weeks without Tate McDermott and Fraser McReight, the two players they can probably least afford to lose, after both committed red card acts of foul play against Moana Pasifika and were subsequently banned. It feels like we’ll learn a lot about the 2024 Reds over the next couple of games.

I discussed the weight of expectation around New South Wales recently and it’s funny, just when you think they’re not in great shape, they beat the Crusaders for a second time this season and will quite likely give themselves a significant confidence boost going forward.

But they do remain a little too inconsistent to have too much faith in their ability to string wins together, and that will make it tough to mount a run for the finals. For one thing, the Waratahs have been hamstrung by injuries in the forwards, and midfield combinations look a little unsettled as well.

There is a big decision at fly-half rapidly approaching too. All their spark in attack from first receiver of late has been when Will Harrison has come off the bench, but with less than an hour of rugby under his belt since coming back from 700-plus days out with injury, you can understand why Tane Edmed remains the safe bet.

That aforementioned expectation might dictate how long that lasts, because the Waratahs are running out of time to continue playing it safe.

Work to do – Western Force

The Waratahs’ golden-point win over the Crusaders just about elevated them out of this category, leaving it solely for the Western Force who, after a strong period of off-season recruitment in important positions, are yet to meet the increased expectations around them.

And for reasons that still aren’t totally clear, they just haven’t clicked into any consistent level of performance that would have them sitting a lot higher up the standings than they are. Their win over Queensland in Round Five remains the high point of their opening seven games, and where it should have been the win that got them going, two disappointing losses in Fiji and Auckland have followed. Now they host the wounded Crusaders this weekend, and it looms as a genuine 50-50 pick.

The shame of the Western Force this year is that that win over the Reds showed that there really is a good team within, one that’s capable of cutting down the supply for one of the leading attacks in the competition. Sadly, they followed that by conceding 11 tries to the Drua and Blues collectively, while only scoring twice themselves.

They have plenty to do to resurrect their season, but there is still time to do it – even if that means winning at least five of their last seven games. But it definitely must start this weekend when the Crusaders head west.

The rest

In short, the Hurricanes and Blues are certainly ‘trending up’, and while I wasn’t alone in not seeing the Hurricanes starting the season this well, the Blues defence in 2024 has been quite outstanding. They have conceded one, none, one and no tries across their last four games, and only 12 overall so far, averaging less than two per game across their first seven matches.

The Chiefs are right up there again ‘as expected’, though it’s already clear their fortunes rest entirely on Damian McKenzie. If he doesn’t play, they come right back to the pack. The Drua and Moana Pasifika fit into this category, too; the Drua will become top-four contenders when they can start pinching wins in Australia and New Zealand, and Moana are certainly a better team in their third season than their first two.

The Crusaders definitely have ‘work to do’, but so do the Highlanders. The Crusaders’ run of seven straight titles was always in danger of ending when so many All Blacks headed overseas after the Rugby World Cup, but the machine was expected to continue churning out more gun players. It’s produced some very good players, certainly, but the red and black rebuild is going to take a little longer than first thought.

The Highlanders have been one of the curiosities of the year so far, slipping from two wins in their first three games to four straight losses and 21 tries conceded, and shelling 47 points in each of their last two starts.

These remaining seven rounds of Super Rugby Pacific will be intriguing for the many narratives that will inevitably play out.

Some teams will get a lot better, while others will get worse. Some teams desperate to get going will remain stuck where they are, neither capable of catching the teams ahead of them nor leaving behind the teams they are currently grouped with.

There might be an air of predictability about Super Rugby this year, but there’s bound to be some surprises on the run home from here.