Daryl Gibson

It's quite a normal pattern.

You know, perennially, New Zealand are slow starters, mainly because of the leave periods that we have

Um, from all black tours through to the super rugby, you know, start of the competition, the all blacks coming in late your roster and those early, early rounds, uh, um, you know, full of development and sort of second string players.

So once, once the teams establish their sales and they get their best players back, you know, you'd expect the New Zealand teams to rise, which has happened.

With Australia, it's reverse.

You get a number of your best players available early.

You get them in pre-season.

And, you know, typically you want to draw New Zealand teams first because you know that they're going to be underdone.

So I'm not surprised of that.

I think...

At the moment, you've got three New Zealand teams playing really good rugby, solid.

We saw that excellent game Reds-Blues here at the stadium, which showed that on any given day, an Australian team with their best line-up can easily compete with a New Zealand team.

I'd be more interested in the debate around the dilution effect of Super Rugby teams across five or six than there has been.

So it'll be interesting to see what that impact of Moana not being in the competition and what that does to the talent pool for the other teams in New Zealand, which would be a good thing.

I think, obviously, Will Jordan coming back into that side will be... Yeah, that does help, doesn't it?

That will help.

He adds a different dynamic from an attacking perspective to that team.

I guess with the Crusaders, they're still searching for, and Taha's a young player who's finding his feet, you know, a 10, a 9 and 10 combination that is dominant.

You know, I thought if you look at the Crusaders' success over the years, it's been built off having either the generational player at

either 9 or 10 at the helm.