The Super Rugby Pacific playoffs have begun. Two Aussies down, the Brumbies remain.

Yes, the sole contender outside the semifinalists, the Queensland Reds, scored three tries and forced 223 tackles to be made in their loss to the surgical Chiefs, who only needed 43% of the ball to assert dominance. 

The Reds will review their season as a success, with building blocks for 2025 cemented firmly in good soil, but next season, only six teams will rightly make it to the big dance.

The other losing quarterfinalists managed four tries between them, and leaked 16. None of the matches were in the balance down the stretch. The Hurricanes scored seven tries in a quarter-final packed with 67 points. 

Who stands to gain the most, and who could lose the most ground in the semifinals? How do the top four matchups shape up and what does the season tell us about this post period?

Leo Tolstoy had his profound character Anna Karenina assert, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In rugby, is that true?

The four winners progressed in commanding ways. The Canes kicked from hand half as much (17 times) as their next opponents did (34). They also made 139 fewer tackles than the gravelly Chiefs who won their turnover battle decisively. The Blues lost the turnover contest badly but were plus-eight in penalty count. The Canes lost the lineout; the Brumbies depended on it, riding a territory gap with 32 kicks.

But as the four clearly best teams square off, we can see through the entirety of the season, how the Anna Karenina Theory plays out.

Television broadcasts routinely feature the least relevant statistics for viewers, deriving from other sports or even how rugby used to be. We can see over a season if the top four teams are in the top five or six for a certain characteristic – but spread throughout on things like possession, territory, line breaks and tackle percentage, that we need more bespoke dashboards for each contest.

For example, in a knockout context, with so few chances given, the efficiency of attack is crucial. Rather than only tracking points per entry (into the 22) or total line breaks –  publish the efficacy of a clean break.

The top four teams are in the top five for line breaks which end in a try: we could call it the ruthless stat. (The fifth is the Reds).

The Chiefs take their chances best: 43% of their breaks end in a try, just above the 42% Brumbies and 41.5% Canes (who make up for it by leading the league in breaks with 123 total).

Tolstoy would approve of this happy statistical cluster, as he would argue the fact that gain-line success is crucial for a winning team, assuming they do not have leaky defence.

The Blues and the Canes get over the gain line a staggering two-thirds of the time (best and second best) with the Brumbies and Chiefs just a few points behind. The Chiefs make up for that small margin with a high rate of ‘dominant’ carries (as judged by Opta, meaning a carry which busted or evaded a tackle, or had significant ‘yards after contact’): 43% of their carries are dominant (this is one of the stats the Brumbies trail in), behind only the slippery rock hard Drua carriers.

Evasion itself is also a stat: here the Canes lead the comp with 26% of their carries evading at least one tackle attempt; the Chiefs were third best with the Blues (7th) and Brumbies (second worst) lagging.

Attack stats tell us a simplistic story which we can double check: yes indeed the Canes and Blues built about 200 or so point margins in their twelve wins, with the Blues notching a comp-best 77 tries and the most secure ruck (only 3% turned over), whilst carrying the ball 400 more times than the Brumbies, who had about a hundred point differential off of their 12-2 season, hurt most of all by their league worst yellow card tally.

Style of attack did differ amongst the ‘Brothers Karamazov’ in the playoffs: the Blues and Canes go blindside a lot, between 12 and 13 percent of the time. The Chiefs (92.4%) and Brumbies (91.4%) do not play blind much at all: they are numbers one and three in the league for sticking to the open side.

The Blues (a league tightest at 14.4% of attacks staying within five metres of the ruck) and the Chiefs (least tight at just 7.7%) diverge here; the Brumbies (13.3%) and Canes (13.0%) are third and fourth tightest. How does that translate? Of the semifinalists, the Chiefs get the ball to their second receiver the most, clearly,(13.6% of the time) whilst the Blues fed it to second receiver the least (6.4%) of all twelve teams. Tolstoy be damned.

A maul is hard to classify as blind or open; here, the Brumbies fit their stereotype, averaging 19.4 metres a match from maul (first in Super Rugby), lapping the Canes (5.7 m) and Chiefs (8..4 m) but setting up an intriguing maul melee in their semi-final with the Blues (second place with 17.2 m).

A clinical attack is a necessity to get into the semis but to progress to the grand finals, scramble defence can be determinative. If all four are so good at finishing breaks, concomitantly, if a team can ‘rob’ a team of a try-from-break, they can turn the match. We can call this the negation stat, and Opta tell us the Canes are best (only letting 6.7% of breaks result in a try). The Chiefs are third best (8.9% allowed), with the Brumbies (9.8%) and Blues (10.1%) rounding out the top five. Again, the Reds second place confirm how well Les Kiss and his coaches have done in 2024.

We begin to see which stats matter most over the long haul.

Exit success is almost never shown on screen, but the four semifinalists are in the top six with the Chiefs (95%) and Canes (94%) almost never failing to get out of their 22 when they have the ball.

Set piece ‘success’ is as tightly predictive of overall success as it is billed, except a bad line-out does appear to be an utter block. With an attacking line-out in the red zone the most probable platform for a try, the throw and catch just has to be sure.

The best four line-outs in the comp are in the semifinal. All are at 87% or better.

The way to judge scrum happiness is different: they occur half as much as lineouts, but the game has evolved to ping the loser more than just see it as a means to restart – perhaps as a way to keep this seminal feature of our sport vital. Scrum adherents cherish this; we argue for the drama of it, as it does not allow a team up by two with the clock in the red to easily put the game to bed either by free kicking themselves or having an easy put in and kick out. Others see the scrum as a tedious blight in need of even further gentrification.

For now, a weak scrum can still lose a game otherwise ‘won’ by sexier stats. The key is not to look at success rate, but the plus-minus of scrum penalties. Here, the Test quality of the Blues front row stands out with 39% of scrums generating a Blues penalty (and an easy exit or entry without the perils of phases into pilferers) and only 8% resulting in a penalty against them (a massive plus-31 point strength for Vern Cotter’s well-drilled side).

The Canes’ scrum is pinged only 4% of the time; but harvests fewer (22%) for a plus-18 point score. The Chiefs are plus-10.5 %. The Brumbies trail at plus-8 but these are all in the top tier of the comp because the flipside (being minus in the scrum) just renders attack and defence so hard.

What do we make of all this? Who stands to gain the most this weekend? Who can ‘take the loss’ the best and who must win?

Before the season began, the Chiefs were seen by many as favourites. Veteran coach Clayton McMillan has one of the best set of performance analysts on staff, and almost all his star players have an All Black case to make. He gave them minutes to seal the deal: concrete shouldered Luke Jacobson (955 minutes), smirking Damian McKenzie (943), big man Tupou Vaa’i (876), unlucky Anton Lienert-Brown (826), and brilliant Shaun Stevenson. However, it was the minutes McKenzie was not on which cost the Hamilton side mojo and maybe three of their five losses.

(Compare McKenzie’s 943 minutes with Noah Lolesio’s 1,066).

With a full team ready to rumble, the Chiefs are dangerous even if the Blues and the Hurricanes have been the best two sides in the Hemisphere all season (with apologies to the Bulls of Pretoria).

Canes v Chiefs: the Ruthless Clinicians

One imagines if this North Island derby (with a tiny margin in points difference over the season) were played in the full and clanging stadium at Hamilton the odds would be about even, but in Wellington, the Canes are justifiably five or six points favourites, especially with the Chiefs’ tackle tally last weekend.

The Chiefs have three avenues to an upset: an off day from the tee by the Canes on a blustery night, a line-out catastrophe at home in the wind, and a mad breakdown war if the visitors are allowed to counter ruck at will – or the Canes cleaners do not take their man off the ball and stay on top of them.

McKenzie is almost peerless in creating attack from nothing but he can also press too hard too soon. Few players can feed off errors better than TJ Perenara; who is in the form of his life and if he were playing for Toulouse might be anointed some sort of mountain-dwelling beast which rhymes with ‘moat.’

The Canes fend and break tackles better than any team in the world this year; Jacobson and Vaa’i must vie for man of the match with Stevenson and McKenzie if an upset is on.

Jason Holland’s successor from Scotland, Clark Laidlaw, has adapted his Sevens sense of a low-card, high-metre, big offload attack, and blended it with Cory Jane’s surprisingly clever defensive patterns along with new ideas for a structured counter attack. Perhaps the Canes have nothing to lose except pride; nobody had them this high pre-season and then prodigy Cam Roigard went down.

Sibling rivalry was deemed a central force in the human story by Carl Jung. These fellows have known each other and competed for a decade and it is never over.

Each side will think they can do something better than the other.

This game seems like a battle of the ballers, a highlight reel, and at the end, the loser not in agony. A subplot is All Black selection and this is one reason we might see a man nobody is talking about now, named as man of the match.

Blues v Brumbies: Who is the Boss?

Cotter does not like his teams too happy; he wants them a bit angry. He and Craig McGrath (defence), Jason O’Halloran (attack), and veteran Wellington lock Paul Trio like to pick and stick. He wants pride. He wants grunt.

At times Hoskins Sotutu, Dalton Papali’i and Akira Ioane seemed determined to rob foes of their souls. Sotutu in particular may have sped Ardie Savea’s return from Japan. His arms seem to keep getting longer, his hands palming the Gilbert like a tennis ball, and over a thousand minutes, more highlights than a K Pop band’s hair. Papali’i has shed his nice guy vibe. Ioane is leaving to make a few bucks in France and perhaps qualify for another nation, so he will bring fire.

Mark Telea and Caleb Clarke are as lethal as any wing duo, including the Top 14, but it is the unheralded Harry Plummer (1,102 minutes) who is surpassing expectations. Some will say he had a cushioned ride behind the bruising boys up front, who kicked the front door down, stomped on it, flipped the divans, and rammed the fridge into oblivion (yet evading arrest) before he had to direct his potent backline with AJ Lam and now Stephen Perofeta backing him up. But this sells him short; Plummer plugged the leaks and found the fix.

He will face a canny operator in Lolesio and his mentor Bernie Larkham (he of the most modest 60% long time winning record in rugby). If one of these teams is to wrest territorial control of the semi it will likely be because one of the tens had an off day.

Pressure changes all of us; this time it is Lolesio who is the ‘been there done that’ flyhalf in the equation, even if he was rather foolishly deemed the fourth best ten in Australia last year by a sour old man whose surname rhymes with bones.

Pack coach Ben Mowen might be one of the unsung heroes of the Brumbies season, but John Ulugia, Rod Seib and Larkham himself will be concerned with discipline.

If the Blues play their best game of the season they will win, no matter what the Brumbies do, but one thing the Canberra outfit knows how to do is help a foe play their worst game.

Muck the ruck, slash the tyres, wreck the spokes, make tackles as long as league, turn the jackler into a tackler, and turn the breakdown into a Pocock senatorial inquest. Kick with purpose, launch feral chase stampedes, and turn al dente Durbanite Ricci Riccitelli into kryptonite pasta; or something like that, in more of a Lord Laurie Fisher vernacular.

The Super Rugby Pacific playoffs kick off now and when the dust settles we will have our finalists. Warts and all, rebellions put down, crusades cancelled, and Lautaka the new Christchurch, this competition lurches into a climax of class.

These four teams are all in the top 12 in the world and on Sunday two of them will likely be top five.