Cape Town - A popular New Zealand scribe says SA Rugby should be ashamed for allowing a weak team like the Southern Kings into the Super Rugby competition.
The Kings re-entered an expanded 18-team competition this year, which also now includes the Jaguares from Argentina and the Sunwolves from Japan.
All three teams have been disappointing, but the Kings have been the worst, winning only one game (at home against the Sunwolves) out of 11 and boast by far the competition’s worst points difference at -315.
Marc Hinton, a columnist for the stuff.co.nz website, has criticised the formation of the competition which, after this weekend’s action, will break for a month for the June internationals.
“This competition, for all its faults, deserves more than the ridiculous, momentum-slashing, fan-challenging, nonsensical pregnant pause it's about to undergo. Just when the race is getting interesting, with three rounds to sort out the final playoff spots, it is all going to go on hold for a month while a bunch of meaningless international fixtures take place. Super Rugby deserves better. Its fans deserve better. We all deserve better,” he wrote.
He was heavily critical on South Africa for pushing to have the Kings included in Super Rugby.
“Yes, the Kings are a joke (shame on you, South Africa, for your insistence that such a lame duck be part of this competition) and the Sunwolves and Jaguares are little more than road bumps in their first year in the expanded competition. And, sure enough, the Kiwi-Aussie rivalry in the ‘Australasian’ group is gloriously one-sided and set to yield a bumper crop of New Zealand teams in the playoffs.
“Also, if you're really picky the format is less than ideal, with consistent, powerful teams sitting below lesser sides on the table even though they have more championship points, because SANZAAR is insistent on protecting home playoff advantage for all of its core territories.”
In the ‘Bad week for’ category at the end of his column, Hinton again singled out the Kings.
“The Kings. Another week, another smashing. Quite why the South Africans fought so hard for this is mystifying to say the least,” he wrote.
CLICK HERE to read the full column on the stuff.co.nz website