Ah it feels good to be back, to back the red and blacks and celebrate another year knowing that your rugby team is the best in the country.
After starting the first round with another routine heartbreaking of the Highlanders, the Crusaders have once again proved that they are the team to beat and are my pick to go back to back to back to back!!! and win another Super Rugby Title this year.
The game itself was somewhat competitive which made a nice change. After starting out firing with a couple of tries and a screamer by Codie Taylor it looked like the game was over in the first 20 minutes.
This scintillating start soon stalled as the savvy of Smith and Shannon Frizzell soon salvaged some semblance of salvation for the stricken souls of the Scots of the South.
All jokes aside the Crusaders were just too good and used the last 20 minutes to blow out a Highlanders team who simply ran out of ideas. After 20 failed attempts to score via a rolling maul the Highlanders lost the ball, lost cohesion and after conceding 13 more points, lost the game.
Ezy win.
It was a dominant performance for a unit which had multiple debutants and was missing a lot of the normal glue that holds their backline together.
David Havili, George Bridge, Braydon Ennor and Will Jordan were all out due to injury and it still felt as if we had the better backline on the day. Once we get to full strength it’ll be hard for anyone to stop us.
In my eyes the biggest question of the tournament isn’t if the Crusaders can repeat…
It’s whether the Chief’s can get a win.
Jezza out.