SA DOESN’T YET HAVE THE EUROPEAN BACK STORIES TO DRIVE INTEREST
It became a bit easier while following the overseas buildup to the two Investec Champions Cup semifinals to understand why South Africa lags when it comes to interest in the elite European competition.
“Why isn’t it catching on?”; “Why are there so few fans in the stadiums?” Those are questions asked not just by European fans and pundits who wonder why SA is part of what is supposed to be a European competition, they are also asked locally.
There are probably several reasons why the self-styled “best club competition in the world” is not as popular here as it should be. Poor marketing at some franchises/clubs, plus some rather strange EPCR protocols, such as the one that decrees teams only get announced the day before the game, which means that fans don’t know until too late in the week what they would be paying for, play a part.
But those might be lesser stumbling blocks if SA teams and their fans had had a 30-year history in the competition, which was first played in the 1995/1996 season. That coincides with the beginning of professionalism and the start of Super Rugby, which this country was part of until Covid arrived in 2020. There was a reason the Red Sox's win in the World Series was so special in 2004 - they'd been through 86 years of drought.
Whereas this country has only been part of the EPCR competition for the past four years, and we therefore only have those disappointing four seasons to look back on, for European fans, it is different.
The emotion of Bath’s challenge last week against the competition champions Bordeaux-Begles, and what it meant to them, was easy to understand when you read about the English club’s past experiences dating back three decades. Opportunity deep in the competition for some clubs only comes once a decade or so, which ratchets up the pressure and the magnitude of the occasion. Bath’s only previous experience of winning the main prize came in 1998, when they won a classic nail-biting final against the heavily favoured French club, Brive, in Bordeaux. Bath edged home 19-18 and no Bath supporter who was there has forgotten the experience.
Ditto the 2006 semifinal, which was the last time Bath got as far as they did this season, against Biarritz. Bath were captained by current England coach Steve Borthwick and lost what is remembered as a highly physical game 18-9, with the Bath players involved still lamenting missed scoring opportunities 20 years later.
IT TOOK A WHILE FOR SUPER RUGBY TO GROW ON US TOO
It took a while for Super Rugby, and it’s previous incarnations as the Super 12 and Super 14, to catch on too but in time SA developed the back stories in that competition that are needed to drive interest. Capetonians who experienced it won’t forget in a hurry the frenzied atmosphere at Newlands over many successive weeks when Bob Skinstad skippered the Stormers through their 1999 ‘Men in Black’ campaign.
Neither will those same people forget the disappointment of the home semifinal against the Highlanders. By then Skinstad was absent because of injury and Corne Krige was captaining the team and Stormers fans were dismayed to wake up on the morning of the game to a front page story in the Weekend Argus about a threatened Stormers players’ strike.
The management denied it and the controversy raged for weeks, with the Stormers’ abject failure to get out of the starting blocks in the game itself fuelling and exacerbating the mood of discontent that displaced the exciting vibe that had enveloped the weeks building up to that moment.
It was, after all, a playoff game. The Highlanders had to travel many hours to get to Cape Town from Dunedin, so everyone expected the Stormers to win. The Crusaders had been outplayed by the Stormers a few weeks before that game and they were the reigning champions and went on to win it again that year so it was reasonable to dream.
But perhaps the most down any army of fans could ever have felt after defeat was eight years later when the Sharks hosted the 2007 final against the Bulls. It was the first-ever final in South Africa, it was between two local teams which meant for the first time in 12 seasons, there would be a local winner. Kings Park was packed to the rafters and there was an atmosphere that can only be imagined at that venue these days outside of a test.
For most of the way, it looked like the Sharks were going to win and when replacement lock Albert van den Berg dotted down, it looked like the Sharks had wrapped it up as the conversion would surely put daylight between the teams on the scoreboard and just a few minutes remained. In the coaching box, Sharks coach Dick Muir and his assistant John Plumtree hugged each other and one of them exclaimed: “I can’t believe we’ve just won the Super 14!”
But they hadn’t won it. A youthful Frans Steyn rushed the conversion and missed it and after a series of rather poor refereeing calls from the Kiwi, Steve Walsh, it was Bulls wing Bryan Habana who sent the stadium into a surreal silence by scoring the last-gasp try that set up the winning conversion.
Two years later the Bulls won the competition again, this time with a far more comprehensive win over the Chiefs on their home ground at Loftus. Like the Durban final, I was there and what an electric atmosphere greeted the teams. The Chiefs never had a hope and they were duly smashed by Fourie du Preez, Victor Matfield and co, thus setting in motion what turned into a winning year for SA with the Boks, beating the British and Irish Lions and also dominating the Tri-Nations. A year later, all eyes were on Soweto when the Bulls beat the Stormers in the decider at Orlando Stadium.
So there were back stories aplenty, and trends too - it was because Crusaders hadn’t lost at home to a SA team since before the turn of the century that Jake White’s Sharks winning in Christchurch when down to 14 men for most of the game was such a big deal in 2014. Any win over Crusaders anywhere, because they were serial winners of the competition, was something to celebrate.
Maybe that will come in the Champions Cup, and when it does, we will see the kind of emotion we witnessed at both venues last week, the other semifinal being the one between Leinster and Toulon in Dublin, and even the Ulster/Exeter Chiefs Challenge Cup semi was an emotional occasion (again there is back story - Ulster last won a trophy in 2006).
But it will require the SA teams to do better than they have done. There is no back story for supporters to connect with when their teams fail to advance beyond the round of 16 or, as was the case last season, they all fail to make it out of the group phase.
SUPER 10 PROVIDED THE SUPER 12 WITH A KICK START
Actually, there was one advantage that Super 12 had at inception in 1996 that the SA participation in the Champions Cup has not had. The Super 12 did not evolve from a standing start.
While the history of the local club participation in the European competition started with the first game that a SA team played, the first game in the Super 12 featuring a SA team was not the first time local fans had been exposed to the Super Rugby concept. Transvaal, today’s Lions, coached by Kitch Christie and captained by Francois Pienaar, a duo recognisable more for what they did two years later, won the inaugural Super 10 final against Auckland in 1993.
That was a star-studded Transvaal team and the Auckland team they beat in the final included future 1995 World Cup final opponents Sean Fitzpatrick and Zinzan Brooke, among others.
A year later Natal made the final, which they lost at a packed Kings Park to the Reds after a league season in which they were given a bit of a leg up by the New South Wales Waratahs forfeiting a game scheduled for Durban because of fears for their safety. It was in the months before South Africa’s first democratic election. The year after that, Transvaal were in the final again, this time losing to Queensland at Ellis Park.
So while we look back at the Super Rugby era as starting in 1996 with the arrival of professionalism in the sport, the reality is that SA got a taste of it before that - and Lions (Transvaal) fans can claim with some justification that it wasn’t just the Bulls who tasted success in Super Rugby, their team did too.
The amateur version of the competition was a tough one too, as in addition to New Zealand provinces and Australian state teams, it also included Western Samoa, who were an international team that had done well in the 1991 Rugby World Cup and were to make the quarterfinals in 1995. One of the best ever Sharks (Natal) performances in Super Rugby was their massive win over Samoa in Auckland in 1994 in a game where Mark Andrews was sent off early doors and they were consigned to playing with 14 men. Remembering what happened 20 years later when the Sharks under Jake responded to the sending off of Jean Deysel by winning in Christchurch, maybe there was a secret there that the Durban team should have tapped into.
THE FRENCH DIRECTOR CONTROVERSY
The controversy over the long perceived selectiveness (particularly from UK fans and pundits) with which French television producers treat the replaying of potential foul play incidents featuring their team is raging on. Those who follow social media may have seen the standoff between one of the commentators in the semifinal in Bordeaux, former England player Andy Goode, and Squidge Ruby, aka Robbie Owen.
Squidge accused the commentating team of “tediously complaining about innocuous refereeing decisions”, adding that “this pretty neatly sums up what discourse and discussion has become in the last few years”. Goode shot back with the “Some of us have played the game and some haven’t” before suggesting that Squidge produced his videos from his mother’s basement.
To my mind, they are both wrong. If only players were consumers of professional rugby, or any professional sport that needs money to survive, then there’d be no professional sport as it would only be watched by a tiny group of people living within their own echo chamber. Spectator sport survives on diversification of opinion and diversification of the makeup of the watching public. And as a consumer, Squidge has a right to air his views
At the same time, however, suggesting that the commentary team should just have put up and shut up, as the old expression goes, when it comes to the calls, or lack of calls, made in Bordeaux is also bollocks. They were at the game and while I do think a match commentary should avoid overdoing opinion, as then it risks becoming noise to the viewer, commentators are paid to give their view and their insight.
My own view was aired in the supersport.com Talking Point earlier this week, but just in case anyone wondered if I was being a hypocrite, because my abhorrence of the numerous stoppages that blight modern rugby has often featured in this column, let me point out that my problem with the Bordeaux game revolved only around lack of consistency in the way technology is applied.
While there needs to be a drive to keep the game as safe as possible, the number of times the game is stopped to check on tackle heights etc, and the way incidents are continually replayed over and over before a decision is made by the referee and TMO, undermines rugby. As does the ease with which cards are dished out, thus moving the sport away from its 15 versus 15 ethos.
I did not include this in the Talking Point, but surely it will benefit rugby if there could be a team employed separately and technology provided separate from the TMO (who should be following play) to assess incidents and make decisions on them WHILE the game is continuing rather than hold up play every time a tackler appears to have collided (which is the apt word because after all rugby is a collision sport) with a no go zone part of an opponents body?
I’d go further and suggest these people only in extreme instances get the right to have a player banished from the field, with a booking system such as the one in soccer being employed instead. The player remains on the field except in exceptional circumstances and the sanction is reviewed afterwards. It might be costly but if it speeds up the game and removes the debate during the game that Squidge found so irritating, then it will be beneficial.
IT’S HOLDING THUMBS TIME FOR RASSIE
This past Monday was 4 May, meaning we went past the point where it was exactly two months before the Springboks play their first test match of the year against England. It’s coming up on us very quickly now. With that in mind, Bok coach Rassie Erasmus should have been encouraged by what he saw from Juarno Augustus in last week’s Challenge Cup semifinal, but then loose-forward depth is a long way from being a problem in South African rugby.
What is starting to develop into a problem is lock and scrumhalf, so it would be understandable if Rassie winces every time he sees a SA player in that position take a big hit or leave the field looking uncomfortable. At this point neither of the two most often used scrumhalves in the Bok match 22 are playing, meaning Grant Williams and Cobus Reinach, and Jaden Hendrikse is set to miss the Sharks’ game against Benetton this week too.
When it comes to the second row, RG Snyman is out long term, we aren’t completely sure when Eben Etzebeth will play again and ditto Lood de Jager. Salmaan Moerat is still sidelined at the Stormers and Pieter-Steph du Toit, who could stand in at lock, is also out.
Mind you, Rassie is in a better position than his first direct adversary in the test match part of the season, Steve Borthwick, who had his continuation in his role as England coach ratified by the RFU this week after a review process some England critics, and apparently even Borthwick himself, consider to be antiquated. In SA there is no debate over who should be coach and unlike England, who are coming off one of their worst-ever Six Nations campaigns, it is full steam ahead.
That includes other levels of the game - the Junior Boks didn’t disappoint against their Australian counterparts in Gqeberha last Sunday, and neither did the flyhalf Yaqeen Ahmed, who I gave such a rave review to after his performance against the Pumas. Just for good measure I popped in on the Workers Day public holiday to Stellenberg to watch the No. 1-ranked schools team comfortably beat Wynberg.
It was my first viewing of Stellenberg and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much tall timber in one school pack. And so many school teams with such a heady mix of pace and skill. SA rugby is in a good place and will be for many years to come.