After the DHL Stormers edged home against LaRochelle in their Investec Challenge Cup in mid-December, the question was asked of their coach John Dobson and captain Deon Fourie if they were looking forward to be playing over Christmas.
Dobson, who is seldom afraid of injecting humour, spoke about how working at that time of year, with the Vodacom United Rugby Championship derby against the Vodacom Bulls looming large for him, meant he couIdn’t go to the many lunches he was being invited to by his mates. But I remember the answers less than I remember my own motivation for asking the question: For me the concept of the Christmas derby just didn’t sit comfortably.
Yes, the Stormers had drawn a big crowd to their derby against the Bulls the previous Christmas, but then isn’t a Stormers/Bulls game always a big draw for fans? It might attract a smattering of spectators on the moon if there was life there. And with many mates who’d normally go to that game out of town for the holidays, it did seem there might be more regular Stormers supporters in attendance if the game was played in April or May, when rugby was more in the forefront of people’s minds than Christmas shopping and family commitments.
UNSURPASSED ATMOSPHERE
As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. An April or May north/south derby could arguably attract more than the nearly 40 000 who turned up at the DHL Stadium two nights before Christmas. There were more than that when the Stormers and Bulls met in a playoff game last May. But then that was a quarterfinal, and not just a league fixture.
But forget the size of the crowd, it was the atmosphere at the game that was so special. Stormers defence coach Norman Laker said the following week that he had never experienced an atmosphere like it at a Stormers game and I’d concur with that. It was a tense, physical game, as north/south derbies tend to be, and the fans from both teams were passionate in their support, yet there was also a vibrancy and sense of community seeping through the atmosphere much more than is usually the case. And yes, more families in evidence too.
Seven days later when the Stormers, who had a busy festive season in comparison to the other local teams, hosted the Sharks, the crowd was almost as big. And the atmosphere was almost as electric, although the game itself was played with less of a test match intensity than the Bulls one was. The Stormers had played two big games in a row and they looked short of a gallop, unable to properly engage all the gears. That they got through it with a win was to their credit, although the Sharks, fresher after taking Christmas off, also deserved credit for the massive intent and physicality they brought to the fixture. It was clear from the opening five minutes, when Stormers players were driven many metres back in the tackle, that the Durbanites had come to Cape Town to play.
CROWD ATTENDANCE WILL ERODE RESISTANCE
Those two crowd attendances over the festive week will probably erode the resistance that some of the other franchises have towards Christmas rugby. The Stormers/Bulls game would have contributed handsomely to the record aggregate URC crowd attendance figures achieved in round 8 and reported by my colleague, Brenden Nel.
Note that the New Year weekend games, which in addition to the Stormers/Sharks game also attracted a massive crowd to Murrayfield for the Edinburgh/Glasgow Warriors 1872 Scottish derby, was round 9. And round 9 will only be completed when the Bulls and Emirates Lions play their postponed game later this month. So you can stand by for the round 8 record to be surpassed!
The URC organisers are human and humans recognise a good thing when they see it, and when they see it they usually want it to continue. So you can take poison on them putting pressure on those franchises who might be questioning the Christmas rugby concept to buy into it.
That there is a bit of opposition, as shown by the Emirates Lions not playing at all in the festive week, is understandable. As so many inland people are at the coast at Christmas, it would be risky to host derbies at the inland venues over the festive week. Loftus might draw 40 000 for a Bulls/Stormers derby at another time of the year, but it is hard to see it happening two days before Christmas. And ditto Emirates Airlines Park.
The Bulls director of rugby Jake White made the point at the post-match press conference that it might be unfair for his team to have to come to Cape Town every Christmas, and on the face of it, he is right.
His team was better off though this festive season than the previous one, where they went to Cape Town two days before Christmas and then to Durban on New Years Eve.
A TIME WHERE PEOPLE WANT TO BE WITH FAMILY
It was a similar story for the Lions, who did the tour in reverse - they went to Durban first, then to Cape Town. In conversation with management from both franchises, the problems associated with this are easy to sympathise with - the Lions were in Durban and their children wanted to go to the KZN beaches but had to be told that dad was working.
It is the time of year South African people want to be with family, both nuclear and extended.
The Christmas period in South Africa is very different to what it is in the northern hemisphere, where festive season derbies are ingrained. That side of the equator a few days are taken off for Christmas and New Year, in the middle of the cold time of the year, but the big holidays are in summer, meaning over July/August. In South Africa that means December/January. That’s also when the long school holidays are, so the mandatory eight week resting period the locally based Bok players will go into in February and March doesn’t suit those with school going kids.
So from a player welfare viewpoint, which was the starting point with my Scrooge mentality to Christmas rugby, there are teething problems. And also possibly fairness problems from a competition viewpoint too. Expecting the two inland franchises to play two away games over Christmas is patently unfair to those teams. Yet reversing the derbies over the week, meaning the Stormers travel to Pretoria the week after the teams meet in Cape Town, wouldn’t work here like it does in say Scotland, where this year Glasgow hosted the first game and won and then went to Edinburgh (just 20 kilometres away) for the Hogmanay game.
Certainly in Cape Town though there’s a massive demand for festive season rugby and it works. Perhaps it just takes getting used to. Working at Christmas is pretty alien to me too, but people do work at Christmas. The turkey that I ate for Christmas dinner didn’t just fly into my garden (and if it did it’d still be alive). The liquor store you rushed to on Christmas Eve had people working in it.
DOMESTIC CRICKET HAD SET FESTIVE SEASON VENUES
And the concept of a traditional venue for a Christmas or New Year game is not new to South African inter-regional sport. We’re talking a different era, but when I was a kid there were were two big Currie Cup cricket games that were played over the festive week and invariably at the same venues - Natal would go to the Wanderers on Boxing Day, and Transvaal would play Western Province over the New Year weekend.
Way back in the day when I wrote a bit of cricket, Mike Procter told me as he was preparing to take the Natal team he was coaching to Transvaal for a Boxing Day clash about how many years in a row as a player he’d had to leave Durban with his teammates at lunch time of Christmas Day to get to Joburg.
The Newlands New Year’s face-off was even more traditional and ingrained, so Transvaal stalwarts of that time (late 1970s into the 1980s) would have spent every New Year’s Eve in Cape Town. With Western Province always having the advantage of being at home over that period.
Back then cricket wasn’t even fully professional in this country, most of the players were amateur (some even played provincial rugby in the winter), but they’d have reasoned the sacrifices they had to make came with the territory in their chosen sport. Rugby was always a winter sport in this country up to three years ago, so it may just take time to get used to, like South African professional soccer players, who play Boxing Day games, had to get used to the switch when their sport switched to a global season a few decades ago.
But maybe in time the Stormers/Bulls game will become a traditional part of Christmas (it almost certainly will) like those cricket matches used to be and like the Newlands and Centurion festive season cricket tests have become. Ditto Stormers v Sharks at New Year. If the status quo from this year is retained, that will mean the Stormers don’t leave home over the festive week, which may be seen by some as an advantage, but the quid pro quo to that is that they will be playing twice against the once of the other teams. So it may all balance itself out.