How I Would Fix Rugby's Nations Championship | Lunch Break

Welcome back to this Tuesday edition of the lunch break. Thank you for your positive comments from yesterday. We're going to definitely be trying our best to do it every day. It's not always that easy. It's not always something new or breaking that you might be able to report on, but I'm going to do my best.

But I don't want to talk about news so much as I want to talk about the nation's championship, the first leg of it, the first three rounds now being completed. And what do I think of it? I think there's definitely merit to it, you know, making it count towards something. The fact that there's now a points table that's going to matter at the end of the year, that does make a difference. Italy losing to Japan for the first time, that does matter.

Fiji leading Scotland, even if it was without Finn Russell, it does matter because it counts towards the points. I'm sure that Fiji earned a couple of dollars or pounds for hosting the games, the home games in the UK. But there is merit to it and it makes sense to me. But what doesn't make sense to me is the fact that they've invented this artificial hemisphere rivalry simply to fit around the schedule. That's sort of a spreadsheet rivalry.

It's not an actual rivalry. You cannot expect, we saw with you Griffin, our friend, that he's a Welsh supporter. He's not going to support England suddenly because they just happen to be in the same hemisphere. That's never going to work. And Japan is not even in the southern hemisphere, but they're lumped with the southern hemisphere for scheduling reasons.

So I don't know why they invented this hemisphere rivalry. It's always been flawed and will forever be flawed. It will never work. And the biggest flaw in that is the fact that a Southern Hemisphere supporter will end up supporting a Northern Hemisphere team when it plays against a fellow Southern Hemisphere team because it means that that southern hemisphere team will end up behind your own southern hemisphere team That the opposite of you know sort of camaraderie between the hemisphere. It's not true.

It's actually the exact opposite that they're achieving here. We'll get back to my solution for that a bit later. I think a more pressing problem that Ben Earl from England pointed out in an article is the fact that the northern hemisphere teams have an incredibly demanding travel schedule when they do go to the south. England traveled 25,000 miles across three different time zones. Four long-haul flights, four domestic flights, that takes its toll.

Ireland didn't go up to Japan to save on the travel. If they went up to Japan, they would have been the team that traveled the most. That's an extremely demanding schedule and the opposite of that's not true. If the southern teams go up to the north in November, they don't travel that far. The places where they're going to be playing, whether it's Paris or Dublin or Cardiff or Rome, they are all close together.

It's a short-haul flight. Transport's not going to be the problem. So it's actually already not a level playing ground. That is something that I'm not sure how they're going to be addressing. Ben Earl suggested maybe playing all the Northern Hemisphere games in July in one country.

But I mean that doesn't make any sense because then what about the income and everything else? So let's say Argentina has to travel to South Africa to play against England, then Argentina also doesn't have an own ground advantage. I'm not sure how they're going to overcome that. That is a major problem. But getting back to the rivalry side of it I think the fact that the top South African the top Southern team will play the top Northern team and number two against number two and the likes It all fine and dandy but it doesn mean much For me for the tournament to be successful, the best teams in the tournament need to be able to play in the final.

Now, there's not going to be any time for the play semifinals or anything like that. So I've got a plan, a suggestion, and I'd like to hear your comments on it, to take those two logs and combine them, so that the points are combined. So South Africa, New Zealand, France, total points scored, your lock points with your bonus points, your points difference. It's not perfect, definitely still flawed, but it's going to give you a better idea of who the actual better teams are in this competition. So that effectively might mean, let's have arguments like France and England are clearly the best teams in the tournament.

They will be ending up playing in the final, or if it's South Africa and New Zealand, South Africa can actually play New Zealand in the final. At the moment, it can't happen because New Zealand and South Africa are both in the Southern Hemisphere team and the others are in the Northern Hemisphere. It's going to be North versus South. Artificial. Let's get away from the artificial thing and figure out who the actual two best teams are and find a way for those two teams to play in the final.

That, to me, adds something to it. It makes it worth supporting. It adds some gravitas to it. I think it might work. I'm not sure.

Obviously, I'm missing something somewhere because I'm sure the bigger brains up in the world of rugby would have thought of that. Let's hear what you think. I'd like to hear your comments on that. So yeah, for me, United Championship is a good idea on paper. Maybe not just a good idea in reality.

I see the World Club, Rugby World Cup has now also sort of fallen by the wayside I sure it going to be a lot to do with logistics as well but yeah that a story for another day Even though anything I love to hear your opinion on this For me the national championship like I said good on paper not so good in practice Anyway in terms of what's happening on the Megafone Rugby tomorrow like I said yesterday we have Martin Devlin from New Zealand as our guest. Like I said earlier the Greatest Rivaly Tour is now getting closer and things are bubbling under nicely. Lots of questions, who's going to be able to play for the South African franchises against the All Blacks when they get here. So we'll talk to him and hear what he says about the way New Zealand rugby is developing under Dave Rennie, the new coach. And obviously we're also going to be talking to Jan De Kunun later today in the Rugby Rundown podcast.

We talked about an article that he wrote about a comment that appeared in the Telegraph in London where the commenter said that the Springboks that played against England is the best team in the world, the Springboks that played against Scotland is the second best team in the world and the Springboks that played against Wales is the third best team in the world and everybody else is ranked behind them. I think that's a bit of hogwash, it's a bit of you know blowing smoke and we talked about that at length. We also talked about the Under-20 Championship, what the Junior Springboks achieved there and they've got used to waiting. we saw the game being delayed, the final being delayed, and also had to wait for the plane yesterday. Interesting story what happened on that plane.

So watch out for that podcast with Jan later today. Interesting as always. Remember on Sunday we published our interview with Tony Brown. Looking forward to that one. Thank you.

Let us know what you think of this, if you want to hear more of these, and see you tomorrow.

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