STRIKING IT RICH: SA rugby should note the Proteas’ Marco Jansen

What? With respect to the quick bowler, who has now morphed into a dinkum allrounder, while he has the height to play lock he doesn’t have the bulk. So, if there was incredulity at the above headline, it is understandable.

But it wasn’t inspired by the possibility of ‘Plank’ replacing Franco Mostert in the Springbok second row, but rather from the obvious benefits that Jansen has derived from his three-month break from cricket. He was given a 12-week conditioning break, and he’s come back looking a bit more pacy and sharper than he was before.

Gerald Coetzee is injured again among a whole host of other SA quick bowlers, but certainly the Jansen conditioning break is an example that SA rugby could follow at this time when the 12-month season makes a proper off-season, and chance to properly strengthen and refresh, almost impossible.

The question of course is what do I refer to when I say SA rugby? Is it SA Rugby, as in the governing body, or the franchises that pay a considerable proportion of the Bok salaries, who should be providing the time for players like Eben Etzebeth to do what Jansen did?

There’s no denying Etzebeth, and others, need it. In fact, there’s part of me that wonders whether the Sharks are already doing that with Etzebeth’s continued absence from the field. But if it is, it’s an unofficial arrangement that wouldn’t go on for 12 weeks. Yes, who pays for a player not playing is a thorny issue, but one thing should be certain - a proper three month break to top players would bring benefits to both parties, meaning to the both franchises and the Boks. It’s a discussion they should be having.

JANUARY HAS BECOME SA20 MONTH IN SA

So there should be a sport’s followers' version of Alcoholics Anonymous. If there was, there might be some chapter somewhere who’d listen to the following: “Hi my name is Gavin, I suffer from a cricket addiction. It used to be well in hand, but that was because I was pompously prioritising test cricket over all else. But now it’s extended to watching the local short form league…”

The BetwaySA20 sure is addictive, and there are good reasons for it. The people who still inhabit my former anti-T20 lobby often throw out negatives that only serve as an indication that they are not watching this particular version of the format.

If they were watching they would not try to tell me that T20 cricket is loaded in favour of the batsman against the bowlers. Maybe in last year’s IPL, where from the little I watched the pitches were concrete highways that made Anrich Nortje look like a trundler.

The SA competition is different. The conditions vary so much from ground to ground, and there is enough spice in the wickets, being that from intent in preparation or sometimes they are just tacky from over-use or being under siege from the weather, that the balance has sometimes gone too much the other way. I feel sorry for fans who go to watch a game where the team batting first is bowled out for 115 or less. When that happens, you might as well just declare the team that bowled first the winner and make an early night of it.

And it hasn’t gone in the direction of the bowler in the way you might expect in SA. Meaning towards the seamer. If there’s a standout feature of this BetwaySA20 apart from the statements being made by young players like the Paarl Royals’ 18-year-old sensation Lhuan-dre Pretorius, it is the way spin has dominated so many games.

‘ORANGE ARMY’ DON’T HAVE A RUGBY TEAM TO SUPPORT

In Gqeberha it looks like they would be happy with a low scoring game. Just so long as their team wins. Before Christmas I wrote about how the impressive turn-out at the Stormers’ Investec Champions Cup game against Toulon had confirmed that the people of the Eastern Cape are hungry for top rugby. Well, while I was disappointed with the size of the crowd at St George’s Park when I watched three days of the cricket test played there over the same weekend as the Toulon game, the people of PE (let’s call it that seeing it’s easier and all the road signs approaching the city refer to Port Elizabeth and not Gqeberha) certainly love the BetwaySA20.

More particularly, from the television images and what the Supersport commentators say about it, they really love their team - the Sunrisers Eastern Cape. They do appear to be more tense at key moments and vested in their team winning than the crowds elsewhere, and several of the players interviewed have spoken about how intimidating it is for a visiting team.

My day job is writing about rugby so you will have to excuse me for wondering if the lack of top rugby in that city, and not having a franchise rugby team to support in a top competition, might just be part of the reason why the Sunrisers supporters care so much. When they lost the opening game against MI Cape Town the disappointment of the home crowd reminded me of the mood in Cape Town when in 1997 it was announced that the 2004 Olympics would not be coming to the city but Athens instead.

Obviously it also helps that in addition to there not being a rugby team to be tribal about, their team also won the first two editions of the competition, thus putting PE on the sporting map in the same way that Kepler Wessels’ Eastern Province team did when they won the Currie Cup final at St George’s Park way back in 1989.

PAARL ISN’T JUST THERE TO PRODUCE BOKS

So in order to get a feel of another venue away from my regular SA20 viewing point in the North Stand at Newlands, I ventured out with a mate to Boland Park in Paarl to watch the Paarl Royals play MI Cape Town. It wasn’t my first visit to the venue, but my first for a Betway game, and it didn’t disappoint. “Hear hear” to those commentators and others who wonder if the stadium might just be the most picturesque in world cricket.

Even though Paarl is only 45 minutes from Cape Town, it did have a much more rustic, country atmosphere about it. Way back in the day, when cricket in this country was first being introduced to night cricket through a 45 over competition known as the Benson and Hedges Series (we just called it B and H) I used to regularly travel with school mates from Durban to the Jan Smuts Stadium in Pietermaritzburg for Natal’s games.

One of the most memorable trips happened during the January school holidays in around 1983, when myself and a friend caught a train from Durban (it took over three hours) to watch Natal play Eastern Province. James Carse was playing for EP. He’s the father of England pace bowler Brydon, but I’d say he was quicker than his son. At a time when most local seamers were fast medium rather than genuinely quick, he was genuinely quick.

The downside was that he sprayed it all over the place, but when he got it on target he sometimes destroyed teams, and he destroyed Natal that night. The stadium announcer renamed him “Cannonball Carse” and it was fitting.

Anyway, after Carse forced an early finish we managed to get a burger and chips at the nearby Golden Egg, found a place to drink alcohol even though we were under-age, and then snuck into the grounds of Alexandra Boys High, the alma mater of former Natal pace bowler Trevor Packer (also genuinely quick when not injured), to find a place to sleep. Which we did in a passageway leading to a change-room near the field where the aforementioned Packer took his wickets.

The next morning we decided against the long walk to the station and even longer train trip and hitched back to Durban. That was great fun, and the two cities did feel a lot further apart back in those days, but during the school term we had a mate with a car who took us to Maritzburg for games. It was always quite a surreal feeling being “out in the country” at night during the school week.

This digression is leading up to the point that the cricket in Paarl felt a bit like that. The grass banks aren’t unlike what we used to get at Jan Smuts Stadium either. The support, while maybe not quite as tribal as they tell me it is in PE, is a lot more so than in Cape Town, where although MI Cape Town appear to be drawing more emotion from the fans than they used to, the crowd does feel more cosmopolitan.

TWO SEASONS IN AN HOUR REQUIRES WARM CLOTHING

A warning for anyone wanting to go watch a game in Paarl who hasn’t before - unless it’s a day game, in which case you should wear as little as possible and just make sure you have sunscreen, take a jersey or fleece with you. It is very hot in the late afternoon but when the wind blows, which they tell me it invariably does, it gets really chilly.

If you forget to do so though the way the locals support their team will warm you up. The people of Paarl, a place where so many Springbok greats drew their first breaths, do have a rugby team to support. If you took away the Royals shirts, which were worn by just about everyone, the next most prolific branding in evidence was that of the Stormers.

So maybe the degree of support the team gets and the tribalism that becomes evident isn’t just down to, as in the Gqeberha instance, not having a rugby team to support. Maybe it is about being in a smaller centre.

YOU’D EXPECT IT TO WORK THE OTHER WAY AROUND

With rugby happening at the same time as the Betway20, those subscribing to Supersport have had decisions to make. But the people of Pretoria this past Saturday had to face down an even bigger dilemma than what channel to flick to - there was a major cricket match and an Investec Champions Cup game happening in the city on the same day and at the same time. At Centurion the Pretoria Capitals were hosting Paarl Royals, at Loftus the Vodacom Bulls were hosting Stade Francais.

As it turned out, those Pretorians who wanted to see their team win should have gone to Loftus. The Bulls thumped the French team. The Capitals posted 213 but were beaten by an excellent Royals chase held together by Joe Root, the highly promising debutant Rubin Hermann and the man who introduced into the cricketing lexicon the phrase “Miller time”.

That there were more people at Centurion Park than there were at Loftus was a massive endorsement for the SA20. The cricket venue looked full and was pumping. I wrote somewhere that the capacity there is 15 000 as that was what I had been told, but I’ve just googled it and have learned that the home of the Titans can take 22 000.

It looked from the television images like every seat and every blade of grass was occupied, so it will be safe to say that there was around double the number of people at the cricket than the official crowd figure of just over 10 000 given for the Loftus game.

A few years ago, given how strong the Bulls brand is and how connected people were with it, we would have fallen over on our collective back if the Bulls had attracted fewer spectators to a game in a big competition than a cricket match down the road.

You’d have expected the impact of the clash of events to be the reverse of what we saw - rugby would have been expected to eat into the cricket attendance. Which should be a concern not just for the Bulls but for SA rugby as a whole. There does appear to be a bit of complacency in rugby when it comes to marketing and selling to the media, with some franchises being better than others, in comparison to the outstanding job being done by the team at the SA20.

IT’S NOT EVERYWHERE, BUT…

Okay, the Sharks are getting crowds back to Kings Park, although the scaffolding and advertising at that stadium introduces a question mark every time the Sharks marketing department boast about a full house. And there were over 50 000 people at the Stormers/Sharks derby in December.

But there are two points to make - one being that derbies have always been popular, and will remain so provided they are not overdone, and secondly, as mentioned in the last column, a paint drying competition would draw a crowd in Cape Town if it was advertised and people were invited. And as an aside, many sports journalists from that region would flock there if the organisers offered them a food platter and drinks. Not me anymore fortunately, but as the late WP rugby president Ronnie Masson once said, “Always the first to criticise, always the last to leave a cocktail party…”

LESS IS MORE

One of the reasons that the Centurion crowd was bigger than the one at Loftus is because there’s an understanding of the concept of less is more. A SA20 game only happens once in a while. Five times during one month of a year, to be precise.

So it’s exciting for fans, it’s fresh, it’s new, it doesn’t happen every day. If there were people conflicted over whether to go to the rugby or the cricket this past Saturday and they said “Well, we can go and watch the Bulls anytime, we can’t watch a SA20 game anytime”, they would be right.

They may not always be at Loftus, but there aren’t many weekends in a year where you can’t watch the Bulls or the other local franchises, either at the venue or on television. If it’s not the franchise team playing, it’s as their provincial guise in the Currie Cup.

Perhaps if there wasn’t such competition among the various T20 leagues around the world for window space, the SA20 would be stretched out over longer. But if it was extended over as many months as a rugby season the atmosphere wouldn’t be as festive as it was at Newlands the other night. I’m referring to the JSK game, when MI Cape Town’s Ryan Rickelton masterclass in short form batting inspired an atmosphere that turned the event into something more akin to a rock concert than a sporting event and fans sang like they’d just watched their team win the FA Cup.

SIZE MAKES A DIFFERENCE

When there are 10 000 people in a stadium that seats just over five times that number, it is inevitable you will see large tracts of empty spaces on the television screen. Which is what the overseas audience would have picked up from the Loftus game. Which offers more fuel to the ire of overseas critics who believe our teams should not be playing in a European competition because there is no appetite for it.

That argument can be partially challenged by pointing to the sizes of the various overseas venues used in the Champions Cup. Games at The Twickenham Stoop always appear to be buzzing, with full houses and a great atmosphere. But Google is my new friend and it tells me that the capacity of The Stoop is 14 816.

So had the crowd at Loftus this past weekend been accommodated at The Stoop, it would have been a very different atmosphere as well as a different picture presented to viewers. The venue would be more than two thirds full (just trust my mental arithmetic on that one as I don’t want to start relying on Google for everything).

Yet if you watch the overseas Champions Cup games, and note how the decibels at a place like Ulster go up significantly on days when that competition is being played, you do get the point of SA’s critics. North of the equator, where the punters have had 30 years of history in the competition, the European Cup games are the big deal in the club season.

And depending where they are in their league, because the relegation battle and where they are in relation to that in the Top 14 definitely impacts how seriously the French take it, the effort of the players appears to go up a level too.

SELECTIONS DON”T SELL COMP BUT PLUM HAS A SOLUTION

Unless you’ve been on Mars, we all know why the SA teams field understrength teams in away games. SA teams compete in two competitions, those competitions are played out of Europe, which brings logistical challenges, and SA rugby is played over a 12 month season. Which means it is difficult to be at optimum, either in effort or in the team that is selected, in all games.

If there is going to be a point to SA’s participation in the elite European competitions, then a way is going to have to be found to ensure that the local teams are more often at full strength, or close to it, than they are now.

The Stade Francais game would not have been sold to Bulls supporters who watched what was effectively a combination of a second or third string team get thumped by Castres, who are not exactly rated as big league in France although they have just beaten Saracens away.

If there is patience, and the young players keep getting opportunities a new tier of players will come through in time to head some of the local franchises towards the Leinster model, where the second string side is hard to beat.

But if you want to see the stars front in every game in the Champions Cup, that still doesn’t get around the problem inherent in having a game in that competition scheduled in Leicester or London seven days before an important URC derby in SA.

The only way to get around that is to listen to an idea floated by Sharks coach John Plumtree - work together with the organisers to ensure that the two overseas games played in the Pool phase get played together, in other words one week after the other, and the two home games together. That will make it easier for coaches to choose their top teams in overseas games, as it is not an in-and-out trip. The returning back over the equator so soon after heading over it in the opposite direction is what makes the travel so taxing.