2024 Super Rugby Pacific – Semi Final 1 Preview
0By James Rodburn
Despite our collective optimism, the first week of the Super Rugby Pacific playoffs failed to produce anything really resembling an upset or even a close finish. A couple of 30 minute periods aside, the result of all 4 matches never really seemed in doubt, with the pre-match favourites winning by an average margin of 24 points.
This imbalance will continue to be a hot topic heading into 2025, especially with the competition moving to 11 teams for at least a year and likely longer. The obvious solution would be to move to a 6 team playoff format, but historically ‘obvious’ and ‘Super Rugby’ have rarely gone hand in hand. For 2024 though, we’re left with the ‘correct’ 4 teams for the semi-finals, and despite the predictability, ending up with the 4 teams that set the pace during the regular season isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Semi-Final 1 – Blues (2nd) vs Brumbies (3rd)
When: Friday, 14th June. 7:05pm NZ time.
Where: Eden Park, Auckland.
TAB odds: Blues 1.20 (-11.5), Brumbies 4.00 (+11.5).
With the 4 home favourites winning comfortably last weekend, the theme of home advantage looms large once again this week. And with good reason; as this week’s graphics show, historically the difference between playing at home rather than away in sudden death matches is stark.
For our first semi-final, needless to say the Blues will be happy they’re hosting the Brumbies rather than the other way around. The Blues have won 12 of the 14 playoff matches they’ve hosted at home, whereas they’ve never won an away playoff game at all (in fairness they’ve only ever played 3 of those). Similarly the Brumbies have won 11 of 14 home playoff matches in their history, compared to just 3 wins in 12 away playoff matches.
This is a common trend across all teams in Super Rugby. Taking all previous Super Rugby semi-finals as an example, since 1996 home teams have won 44 of the 52 (85%). We’ve always known home advantage was important in Super Rugby, but the fact that this advantage holds and in fact increases in the playoffs, even though the teams are theoretically more evenly matched, is an interesting phenomenon.
All of the above shouldn’t imply that home advantage is the reason the Blues are favoured by 11 points in this one. Last week I pointed out that the Brumbies’ record belies their frankly average statistical performance in most categories. This didn’t matter against a team with similar stats to them in the Highlanders, but it very likely will this week. In the chart below we can see that the Blues have a clear advantage over the Brumbies in almost every statistical category. While the teams have won the same amount of games this year so far, the Blues have won by a convincing 11 points more on average than the Brumbies (18.2 vs 7.1). They deserve to be considerable favourites by any metric.
Furthermore, if the Brumbies concede anything like the 13 penalties they did against the Highlanders, they’ll be inviting the Blues to regularly set up camp in their half, something the Blues love to do, and which will almost certainly turn into consistent points for the home side. That combined with the Blues’ top-ranked defence, and if they get away to any sort of decent lead, they’ll be very hard to run down.
On the flipside, the Brumbies best chance will be to turn the match into a grind. For a team in the Blues that doesn’t mind being patient with the ball, if the Brumbies can spoil some of those long sequences of possession, then they can drag this match out so that it’s not decided until the last 10 minutes. This was the blueprint in the identical fixture in 2022, in which the Brumbies ground away with 2 maul tries in the rain to stay in the contest. In the end it took a last minute charge-down from Ofa Tu’ungafasi for the Blues to progress to the final with a 1 point win. With rain currently forecast for Friday too, the Brumbies could do worse than attempt to follow the same formula.
Prediction: I generally prefer to avoid these kind of specific predictions because you rarely come out of them looking smart. But given it’s the semis and all: Blues by 7.
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