2 hours ago
2
As the Wallabies gathered in camp in Sydney and eyes turned to Test rugby, questions around the Hurricanes’ incredible finals run - and Super Rugby title - hovered, a few days on.
Namely, what the hell was that? And secondly, did the ’Canes just showcase the new style of game needed to win a World Cup?
The Hurricanes were utterly dominant in winning their first Super Rugby title in a decade, almost scoring 60 points in each of their three finals against the Brumbies (66-12), Blues (57-21) and Chiefs (60-5). The victory margin in the grand final over the Chiefs was a record.
Contrary to the age-old tradition of defence winning finals, the Hurricanes scored nine tries in each of three playoffs, with unstoppable attack. It ended up offering some small solace to the Brumbies, who’d been despondent after first getting smashed in the qualifying final.
“I don’t know if it softened the blow, it still stings a fair bit,” Brumbies and Wallabies fullback Tom Wright said.
“But I was under no illusion the ability that the Canes had. To see the sort of demolition run they went on was no surprise. It minorly softened the blow, a little bit.”
The high-risk, high reward style used by the Hurricanes will have Test rugby coaches running to their whiteboards ahead of the Nations Championships starting next week.
Coaches are always on the lookout to stay ahead of, or on par with, global trends in game styles. And after years of rugby being dominated by rush defence and structure, the swing towards all-out attack has not only been seen in Super Rugby, but in most other major competitions, too.
“Over the years we’ve seen a lot of teams try and all play very similar, so someone obviously started those trends,” Wright said. “In another four or five years, maybe we’ll be saying that the Canes of 2025-26 started a new wave of attacking footy.
“It showed they’d have really intentional training. It’s an educated guess that they’d train that way and they push themselves to be able to execute. You don’t just go out there and just go, let’s just pass the footy around and see where we land.”
The Canes’ dominant wins saw the usual critics of Super Rugby emerge in the northern hemisphere, where competition has always had a reputation of being defence-lite.
Super Rugby recorded its highest tries-per-match tally in 2026, with 8.59 tries a game.
But other competitions have not only followed suit and also drastically increased try tallies, the English Premiership this season finished with a higher per-game try tally than Super Rugby, at 8.64, for the first time.
With 5.8 tries a game, champions Northampton were the northern equivalent of the Canes (6.1 tries per game). In France, European Cup winners Bordeaux and Top 14 powerhouse Toulouse also averaged over five tries a game.
All have shifted to creating - and thriving in - chaos, and looking for opportunities to strike with speed against unstructured defences, from contestable kicks and turnover ball. The removal of kick-chase blockers in late 2024 was a turning point, and offloading has also increased with lower tackle heights. The Canes scored almost a third of their tries in 2026 from kicks or turnovers, and over 60 per cent of tries came within three phases. Penalty goals are almost extinct.
For sides like the Wallabies, who have played a highly structured, ball-retention game under Joe Schmidt, the question is: do we need to change? And urgently?
“There’d be massive thought being put into it from Joe and the coaching staff, alongside a whole heap of other coaches around world rugby, around the trade-off of risk-reward, and does it become like ... who can score 40 the quickest? I don’t know,” Wright said.
The good news is the Wallabies have the cattle and the instincts to attack, with players like Wright, Max Jorgensen, Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii, Dylan Pietsch and Tate McDermott. Mark Nawaqanitawase and Zac Lomax are also in the wings, and incoming coach Les Kiss has coached a higher-risk style at the Reds.
“Look at some of the calibre of players we’ve got,” Wright said. “There’s absolute massive merit in that (direction), understanding that at Test level there’s a fair bit more that goes into it as well, around the set-piece battle. But I am a massive fan of it.”
The problem for the Wallabies is they could be late to the party, as far as shifts in Test rugby styles. It’s already happened, based on the record points and try-scoring tallies seen in the usually staid Six Nations earlier this year.
The tournament saw 111 tries in 15 games (at 7.4 per game); a huge rise from 4.8 tries per game in the 2022 Six Nations. Two of the Wallabies’ rivals in July, France and Ireland, scored 30 and 24 tries respectively. That was the highest, and the fourth-highest, number of tries ever seen in a Six Nations tournament.
