New Zealand eyes are on Japan this weekend, for a top of the table clash between two unbeaten teams. There are All Blacks, Springboks and Wallabies taking the field, guided by two of the most experienced coaches in Super Rugby history. But it’s not the Sunwolves hosting the Chiefs. It isn’t even a Super Rugby match.
Instead, the game will be played 90km up the road from Tokyo in front of a full house at the Kumagaya Athletic Stadium. The protagonists are Toshiba Brave Lupus and the Panasonic Wild Knights, and the title that the victor will take a big step towards is the Japanese Top League.
It is a measure of the interest the game in post-Rugby World Cup Japan has gained in New Zealand that familiarity with the country’s company-based semi-professional league is growing, at a time when most Super Rugby matches are played in sparsely populated stadiums.
A 16-team round robin, the Top League runs until early May. One game a week is shown live on New Zealand Sky Television – admittedly, almost always the glamour Kobe team featuring Dan Carter and Brodie Retallick – but such is the volume of former Super Rugby stars now featuring, awareness is growing of all the teams.
Seven members of South Africa’s victorious World Cup team now play in Japan, on par with the number who are now Europe-based. Five from each of the Australian and New Zealand squads also returned after last year’s tournament.
Among these are the All Black captaincy contender Sam Whitelock, Wallaby David Pocock and Springbok Damien de Allende, who joined Panasonic where they are coached by the former Crusaders, All Black assistant and Wallabies coach Robbie Deans.
Toshiba, who share with Panasonic and Kobe the last remaining unbeaten records after four rounds, have shot up the table under the guidance of the former Bath and Crusaders coach, Todd Blackadder. Blackadder has charted the rise with a playing cast including former All Blacks Matt Todd and Richard Kahui as well as the Japanese national team’s New Zealand-born captain, Michael Leitch.
Not only are there in excess of 25 players with Super Rugby experience from New Zealand alone in the Top League, many of whom were also All Blacks, just three of the Kantoku (head coaches) are Japanese. Deans and Blackadder have 17 years coaching in Super Rugby between them. Their fellow Kiwis Wayne Smith, Steve Hansen, Milton Haig, Danny Lee, Greg Cooper and Mike Brewer also lead club programmes.
Hansen, who replaced South Africa’s World Cup-winning coach Jake White when he took over as director of rugby at the big spending Toyota Verblitz, Smith and Blackadder each have New Zealand coaches working with them. The two-time title-winning Bulls coach Frans Ludeke, fellow South Africans Alistair Coetzee and Hugh Reece Edwards, and the former Australian Super Rugby coaches Damian Hill and Richard Graham also run teams.
Leitch, who played 34 matches for the Chiefs, is a good example of how the proliferation of foreign expertise has benefitted the Japanese game at league and Test level. While the company teams are sprinkled with different nationalities, the Japanese have an eligibility formula that has steadily increased the competitiveness of the league while enhancing the national side, as opposed to compromising it.
A match day squad of 23 can include up to six foreign players. Only three can be capped internationals, two who can start and one on the bench. There are two slots for non-capped overseas players, with a sixth place available to non-Japanese players of Asian descent. Non-capped players who qualify for Japanese residency are not governed by these restrictions.
As a result, many of the “longer-termers” gain nationality. It’s a smart career move. It increases their value to clubs, as they are no longer captured by the foreign quota. They also become eligible for Japan. It is primarily for this reason that there is a strong European and Pacific Island influence on the Brave Blossoms, while the increasing strength of Japan on the international stage reflects the rise in its domestic playing standard.
With just nine wins from 63 matches, the soon to be extinct Sunwolves have arguably damaged external perceptions of the Japanese domestic game, but their failure in Super Rugby is as much due to administrative ineptitude as anything. Five coaches in as many years hardly screams stability, while the participation of Japanese Test stars has been limited, with the side primarily staffed by players loaned from company teams, some of whom were fringe performers at their clubs.
The Sunwolves are close to the finish line, but they will continue to draw capacity crowds to Prince Chichibu Memorial Stadium until the end, having consistently had one of the competition’s best and most vibrant attendances. They exit at a time when the Top League is drawing record crowds, and is offering a second helping, with a new edition set to kick off later in the year as a result of the stalling of plans for the addition of a fully professional competition to the calendar.
With Japanese interests having recently purchased New Zealand’s leading player agency, and the future of the Sanzaar competitions uncertain, Japan is going to continue to loom ever larger in the southern hemisphere rugby consciousness. Just as it will when Toshiba and Panasonic kick off on Saturday.