How the New Zealand sides are shaping up after a month of Super Rugby derbies

The first four rounds of Super Rugby have been thick with New Zealand conference derbies. Jamie Wall assesses how the five Kiwi teams are travelling.

The last month has been a pretty torrid one for the New Zealand Super Rugby teams, with home derbies dominating the draw – some amazing, some not so much.

The upshot of all these bruising encounters is we now have a reasonable indication of who might dominate the New Zealand conference in 2017.

Chiefs: Right now the men from Waikato are the form team, with wins over the Highlanders, Blues and Hurricanes. All of those came about in contrasting circumstances, which shows that the Chiefs are capable of winning well, ugly or even in the most extreme of weather conditions. Tawera Kerr-Barlow is in career-best form, Aaron Cruden is showing his new employers in France what they can hopefully expect next season and Damian McKenzie’s pre-kick routine is as creepy and effective as ever. Right now about the only thing that could derail them is another scandal, although it’s doubtful any local strippers would be answering any phone calls from the Chiefs these days.

Crusaders: Another unbeaten team, though it’s likely that the Crusaders’ faithful have had enough of them leaving it to the absolute last minute in each game to preserve that record. Their game against the Highlanders will go down as one of the all-time greats, but what might be more impressive in the long run is the fact that they’ve blooded no less than 13 new players already this year. This seamless introduction has definitely been most notable at first five, where a potentially disastrous injury to Richie Mo’unga has been offset by the confidence of Mitchell Hunt. Even coach Scott Robertson is a rookie at this level, although if the Crusaders can keep winning we’ll get to see what he is an expert in lit af dance moves...

Hurricanes: The reigning champs have scored almost twice as many points as any of the other New Zealand teams, but that’s mainly due to the cupcake schedule that saw them play the Sunwolves and Rebels first up. Then they got downed in torrential rain by the Chiefs, but bounced back to hammer the Highlanders in Wellington. Having two Barretts and two Saveas must seem criminally unfair to the rest of the teams, especially since Julian is looking like he’s interested in Super Rugby again and Jordie might just be as good as Beauden. Meanwhile, Ngani Laumape is continuing the depressing trend for NZ Warriors fans of watching former players achieve great success when they leave the club.

Highlanders: For an hour against the Crusaders, the Highlanders looked like the team that won Super Rugby in 2015. For the next 20, they looked like the one that lost their first eight games in a row in 2013. Unfortunately, this inconsistency got solved by playing like the most boring team in the world the next week against the Blues, and nothing they did seemed to work against the Hurricanes. The Highlanders are easily the team most affected by injuries; one bright spot though is coach Tony Brown’s valiant fashion sense – he deserves much credit for attempting to make the cheesecutter hat cool again for white guys.

Blues: A serious disappointment, and that’s just the view of Hurricanes fans who just want Tana Umaga to turn out to be a good coach. After cruelly taunting their faithful with a big win over the Rebels in round one, the Blues reverted to back to type over the next three weeks. They lost heavily to the Chiefs, narrowly to the Highlanders, then became the Crusaders’ latest comeback victims. There are glimmers of hope, though: Gus Pulu’s form at halfback has been great, as has George Moala now that he’s starting, plus Sonny Bill Williams is still yet to return. Tana still needs to make his mind up on a couple of things, not least who is actually in charge – the Blues have had three different captains start a game in the first four weeks of play.