Every so often, a team wins a game they weren’t expected to, and you just know from the reaction that it means more to their campaign than the margin of victory, or the value of the competition points earned.
The ACT Brumbies’ 21-20 win over the Blues at Eden Park in Auckland on Friday was one of those wins.
On paper, the impact appeared negligible. The Brumbies were seventh in the standings coming into Round Four on the back of an opening win over the Fijian Drua in Suva and two straight losses – to the Western Force at home in Canberra and the Chiefs in Hamilton – and gaining four points in Auckland only pushed them up to sixth.
That points to how ridiculously close Super Rugby Pacific has been so far in 2025, with no sign of letting up yet. Despite the Drua and Moana Pasifika recording their first wins of the season in a weekend that annoyed plenty of tipsters and fantasy teams, only five teams gained places in the table.
The Brumbies find themselves one of five teams on nine points, courtesy of two wins and a bonus point. Just four points – one win – separate the Highlanders in third with the Hurricanes in last spot.
Opta Sports noted that 2025 is just the second season in Super Rugby’s 30-year history where every team has won at least once after four rounds. That last happened in 1998.
The season is only a month in, but the sprint nature of the competition means that the teams yet to have a bye – more than half the competition, currently – have only 10 games between now and the new six-team finals series.
The Blues don’t lose to anyone at Eden Park that often, but this Brumbies loss was suddenly their second straight at home, after defeat by the Chiefs only a week earlier.
It means teams can really set up their season over the next four to six rounds, and that any points gained against every other team in the enlarged peloton in this coming period are essentially worth double; the value of the points earned plus the value of the points the opposition didn’t earn.
That partly explains why the Brumbies players and coaches celebrated the Blues win so spontaneously. It wasn’t just that they’d all won at Eden Park for the first time in a Brumbies jersey, or that it was the first win at the venue for the ACT side since 2013.
It was also that the Blues took only a solitary bonus point out of the game, leaving the reigning 2024 champions in a playing style rut, and stuck at 10th in the standings.
The Blues don’t lose to anyone at Eden Park that often, but this Brumbies loss was suddenly their second straight at home, after defeat by the Chiefs only a week earlier. You have to go back to the start of the 2023 season to find their previous loss, to the Crusaders, which coincidently followed another Eden Park defeat by the Crusaders in the 2022 final.
They were also beaten at home by the Crusaders in 2021 but going back to the post-Covid resumption of rugby in June 2020, the Blues have lost just five of their 37 games at New Zealand’s national stadium.
The last time they were beaten by an Australian team in Auckland was that 2013 defeat to the Brumbies, a milestone coach Stephen Larkham likened to another once-in-a-decade event for the Canberra-based side.
“We’ve had a tough start to the season with our travel and to beat the Blues in Eden Park is very rare for us,” Larkham said afterwards.
I think this is just going to give the boys confidence in what we have been doing, knowing that’s going to work in the big moments and in the big games
“It’s like the British and Irish Lions, it comes around every 12 years – 2001 and 2013, now 2025,” he added with a satisfied grin.
Larkham’s niche stat actually omitted another Brumbies win in Auckland in 2008, but his point remains.
Super Rugby has always been a competition where even just winning your home games is hugely beneficial. The Brumbies know this, with their Round Two loss to the Western Force their first defeat at Canberra’s GIO Stadium in nearly two full seasons, and only their second home defeat in 17 games since the start of 2023.
So this really was an important win for the Brumbies. A one-and-three record after four rounds would have made the run home a lot harder, particularly after four-and-one starts to the last two seasons, and six straight wins to start the 2022 season.
All three campaigns ended at the semi-final stage, and all three saw them establish position in the top four early and never cede from there.
“We’ve been a bit disappointed coming in here, losing two out of our first three, but we were right there in all three of those games,” Larkham said.
“I think this is just going to give the boys confidence in what we have been doing, knowing that that’s going to work in the big moments and in the big games.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done. Obviously, there’s a whole season ahead of us still, and we’ve still got some other challenging games coming up – the Drua (at home this Friday), and then we’re into the Waratahs (in Sydney), who have been playing exceptionally well this year.”
It was a marked improvement defensively from the Brumbies. After conceding 32, 45 and 49 points, and 16 tries across their first three games, they kept the Blues to just three tries and 20 points – and none of them after the half-time break.
The Brumbies demolished the Blues in their previous areas of strength and made them look exactly like so many teams on the receiving end of their domination last season.
While their tackle success rate and missed tackles tally were in line with their season average coming into the game, their impact came from a noticeable lift in breakdown efficiency, both in their ability to produce quick ball for themselves (both tries coming from sustained periods of quick phase ball), and their success at slowing down the Blues at the rucks and not allowing the Aucklanders to build the same momentum.
Across the first three games, the Brumbies averaged 5.7 turnovers won per game, and led the competition in this metric. At Eden Park, they won eight turnovers and kept the Blues to a ruck success rate just below 90 per cent, when they had previously been winning their own ruck ball with 96 per cent efficiency.
The Blues had all their success in 2024 playing direct rugby and dominating the breakdown, and the Brumbies turned this around and threw it straight back at them. They demolished the Blues in their previous areas of strength and made them look exactly like so many teams on the receiving end of their domination last season.
“If we look at their last 12 months, the Blues are the best attacking team in the competition so to keep them to 20 points, that’s pretty special,” Larkham noted.
“I just thought that the way we defended in that first half, particularly the first 20 minutes of the first half, was pretty phenomenal. It’s something that we had been working towards, and we’ve just got to keep it consistent now.”
They’ve given themselves the tools for success after a rocky start; now they have to use them to drive forward for the rest of the 2025 season
And that is the Brumbies’ challenge from here. A tough start to the season gets no easier, with three more away trips in their next five games, with a bye in the middle. By the completion of Round 10, the Brumbies will have played six of their nine games on the road; their run home to the finals series is then stacked with four home games out of five and a bye in the penultimate round.
But having muscled up against the one of the competition favourites, kept them scoreless in the second half and having seemingly addressed the defensive concerns that saw them concede an average of 42 points per game for the first three rounds, the Brumbies have found an effective method that will keep most teams in check.
The Drua in Canberra, the Waratahs in Sydney, and the Highlanders back in Canberra all before their first bye of the season in Round Eight gives the Brumbies a chance to build on the Eden Park win and create some momentum.
They’ve given themselves the tools for success after a rocky start; now they have to use them to drive forward for the rest of the 2025 season.
