Oh goodie -its going to be the Super 15 *YAWN*

WTF? Can't the NZRU tell that this competition has reached its use by date and they seriously need to think up something else - or at very least, refresh the competition?

Declining crowds. Declining TV audience. Declining column inches.

How many more clues do they want?

Their season is a mess, the S14/15 is stale and the rules stink.

DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, YOU IDIOTS!

Its not the competition that sucks...its the code

My understanding is they have expanded the finals series to be like the NRL and more crucially….refused to start the season in Feb and didn’t lose the yaya's doing so. Kinda sounds like a pretty good result to me

Masti - it is way, way deeper than that.

Can't the NZRU tell that this competition has reached its use by date and they seriously need to think up something else - or at very, very least, refresh and re-launch the competition? Personally, I don't even bother with the Virtual Super comp on the internet anymore let alone watch most of the games.

Declining crowds. Declining TV audience. Declining merchandising sales. Declining column inches. Declining interest.

How many more clues do they want?

Their season is a mess, their premier comp is stale, the rules stink, and nowhere is the dead hand of monopoly more evident than in Sky's lacklustre coverage.

And they think the solution is to continue to ignore the Air New Zealand Cup (a mistake the Saffa's haven't made in regard to their Currie Cup) and add an extra team so we get another round of boring goodness.

If I have to watch boring rugby, I would prefer it to be in the Air NZ Cup - at least that means having a province I care about (that way the result is the most important thing, not the spectacle) playing on a sunny winter afternoon so I can go out and do something more entertaining in the evening.

Surely if the NRL teaches us one thing, it is that a ferociously parochial, national competition is always going to generate more interest - and more forgiveness of local rule "interpretations" to allow the game to flow - than a meandering competition that even the players and commentators appear bored with half the time.

The NZRU is bereft of ideas, a monolithic bureaucracy that is currently full of aparachiks who are simply not performing. The game is controlled from the top by people who are out of touch and out of ideas.

My solution is to sell 25 year franchise leases for provincial unions, with the top four teams from the Air NZ Cup playing in the Super competition.

That way any team who can afford to be in it can be. A team might not be able to afford to buy in for twenty five years, so it might wait for the price to drop and wait five or ten years. So if, for example, five years into the leasing period Eric Watson wants for some reason to buy a twenty year franchise and pump millions into Thames Valley until it becomes a mighty force in NZ/super rugby from it's 25,000 seat brand spanking new Stadium in Paeroa then so be it.

I haven't seen much of this year's comp but it sounds like the last two seasons of S14 have been much more exciting than several previous.

I do wonder how much of this "S14 sucks" attitude comes from the fact that the Blues are a constant chore and there's no NZ domination like the original Blues and Crusaders years...

I remember a lot of 56-45 type scorelines in the past htough

The competition just isn't intense enough. It should be shrunk back to a Super 11 with a 4-3-4 country split (NZ-Aus-SA). AND THEY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE DEAD HAND OF SKY'S MONOPOLY ON THE TV PACKAGE!!!!!!