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Looking Back Paves The Way Forward For Rugby
Published: May 25, 2010
These tours have been replaced with the so-called more glamorous competition of the Tri-Nations, which pits the top three teams of the Southern Hemisphere against each other in a series of games every year. Or we get teams travelling between hemispheres, playing against a handful of different teams, all tests, no midweek games and no series between two nations.
This, I believe has been a major reason for the decline in interest of rugby and value of test matches. Twenty years ago, you might have your country playing three or four tests a year. They were special because they didn't come around all that often and were a huge occasion when they did. Also, the players and the fans knew, that if they did not win the series against their opposition, they might not get another chance to play them for another few years making each victory even more special and more essential.
These days we see teams playing up to 15 or 16 tests in a season. While this may seem like a good idea on the surface, a deeper look shows that it indeed is the problem for the decline of meaning in testing rugby over the past decade. Each test match should be sacred, but by playing them so often they lose their meaning.
With the Tri-Nations in place each of the top three Southern Hemisphere teams plays each other three times every year. This detracts from the meaning of each individual test as everyone thinks that if they lose this one, then they will get another shot at it next week, or the week after. And then even if they lose those games, there's a new competition next year. If the teams only met once every few years, the wins would be much more special, would bring much more out of the players and would mean much more to the general publ...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Rugby Union
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