CHAMPIONS CUP REVIEW: A reality check for SA teams

The first round of the Investec Champions Cup provided a sobering reality check for the South African teams as they head into their third season in the prestigious European competition.

By the end of it, we probably knew what we knew beforehand - the Hollywoodbets Sharks are by far the most likely of the local sides to challenge for silverware, but even the team that made it into this competition by winning the EPCR Challenge Cup last season was far from completely convincing.

Their win over Exeter Chiefs wasn’t quite as convincing as some might have anticipated it to be given the Chiefs are bottom of the Gallagher Premiership with seven losses in seven games, and it also came at an injury cost. The Sharks did win though, and they are off to a comfortable start in the pool phase of the competition.

You usually only have to win twice to ensure a passage to the round of 16 phase, so John Plumtree’s men can consider themselves halfway to their initial target. Although if they watch the DHL Stormers game against Toulon in Gqeberha that followed the one in Durban, they may realise how important it is for them to win an away game too. For they have Toulouse, who smashed Ulster in the first round, as their other home pool opponents.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND UGLY SIDE OF FRENCH RUGBY

One of the messages to come through on this opening weekend was just how tough the French clubs can be when they come to play. Tough being one word you can use, another apt expression being over-robust. The 27 000 people who watched the game at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium saw both the beautiful part of French rugby and the ugly side.

The beautiful part came early on when for a while it looked like their combination of power and pace might run the Stormers ragged. Stormers director of rugby John Dobson admitted afterwards that he was concerned his team might get a real hiding when the visitors went 10-0 up after 12 minutes.

That they didn’t was because they made Toulon tire. That they didn’t go on to win when they got momentum was because of a combination of the Stormers’ trend for the season of being profligate and giving opposition teams early Christmas gifts and the sheer hardness and physicality of the Toulon approach.

The Stormers gave away all three tries that were scored against them through their own errors. Incidentally, flyhalf Manie Libbok was centrally involved in all of those errors too. But at the same time, what needs to be recognised was the hardness of the hits and the aggression of Toulon. The mistakes they feasted on were also partly created and forced by themselves.

The really ugly part was the hit on Libbok later in the game, the umpteenth questionable one, let it be said, that looks likely to keep the Springbok out of rugby for some time. That was a red card in any era, not just this one where there’s so much focus on head contact and concussion, and there were a few others. One earlier on Jean-Luc du Plessis stands out.

WINNING IN SA WAS HUGE FOR TOULON

The message from all of this, and the one that the Sharks can absorb too in their quest to win the competition, is that when the French are desperate to win, they go all out and throw the kitchen sink at you. It was clear at the post-match press conference that Toulon saw winning in South Africa as a massive triumph for them and an important stepping stone, and that they felt they needed first and foremost to match the South African physicality.

Maybe it was a case of them over-compensating. Maybe you needed to be there, which I was, to notice how borderline over-the-top Toulon were with their physicality. It was frightening. I have to agree with Dobson - it was a brutal game, which was one of the reasons it was so long. The first half felt like it went on forever, a bit like the first half of the second test of the 2021 British and Irish Lions series.

Only on that occasion, it was because the under-pressure refereeing team was forced to be over-officious. There was definitely not anything over-officious about the officials in the Gqeberha game. They actually let a lot go. The reason the half dragged on so long was because of stoppages for players to be attended to. Keke Morabe was stretchered off with a season-ending injury, and it beggared belief that Ben-Jason Dixon passed his initial HIA test and returned to the field, for he was prone on the turf for quite some time.

So the Sharks can be warned about what they can expect when an even bigger side, both physically and these days in reputation, in the form of Toulouse visit them at Hollywoodbets Kings Park on 11 January. The message from the weekend was clear - when the French come to play, they really come to play, and to win by any means.

BEATING BIG TEAMS OVERSEAS IS A BRIDGE TO CROSS

The Sharks should look to win at least one away game, starting this week, and that was where the other message came through - winning overseas remains difficult for South African teams. Vodacom Bulls director of rugby Jake White said he was looking forward to the weekend’s game against Saracens because it would allow him to measure his team’s progress against one of the bigger teams.

The message he got back was that there is still a long way to go, just as there is a long way to go when it comes to dealing with the alien weather conditions you sometimes encounter north of the equator at this time of the year. As White said beforehand, give a storm a name and you know it is big. And if you read the UK media, Storm Darragh ran rampant.

They should have given what Saracens hit the Bulls with a name too. The Bulls were blown away, both literally and figuratively, and the scoreline actually flattered the visitors. The defeat though needn’t be the train smash for the Bulls that the one in Gqeberha was for the Stormers. They will be back on their home patch of Loftus, for the first time in ages, on Saturday to face Northampton Saints, and they owe the English champions one after the fuss around their team selection for last season’s Champions Cup quarterfinal at Franklin Gardens.

With the altitude and the heat in their favour, you’d favour the Bulls to bounce back, but the point is that the Bulls will have been dealt a psychological blow regarding their chances of winning the really big games overseas, which you need to do to win the Champions Cup.

They are the one local side that has beaten a really big overseas team away, they did that when they beat Leinster in the 2022 Vodacom United Rugby Championship final, but the Saracens game was a severe setback nonetheless.

STORMERS’ ASPIRATIONS IN TATTERS

For the Stormers though, it might not be remiss to suggest their Champions Cup aspirations for this season are gone before they even started. You can’t lose a home game and expect to do well, and their mounting injury list makes it highly unlikely they will reverse Saturday’s result when they visit The Stoop on Saturday to play Harlequins.

It wasn’t a great weekend in the EPCR Challenge Cup either for South African teams, with the Cheetahs only managing to draw, but the big defeat suffered by the Emirates Lions to the Ospreys needs to be seen in context - it looks like the Lions are using the Challenge Cup as a development competition. As the one URC franchise that took the Carling Currie Cup seriously, that approach would make sense too.

WEEKEND INVESTEC CHAMPIONS CUP RESULTS

Bath 20 La Rochelle 24

Hollywoodbets Sharks 39 Exeter Chiefs 21

Clermont Auvergne 28 Benetton 0

DHL Stormers 14 Toulon 24

Northampton Saints 38 Castres 8

Munster 33 Stade Francais 7

Saracens 27 Vodacom Bulls 5

Glasgow Warriors 38 Sale Sharks 18

Racing 92 23 Harlequins 12

Bordeaux Begles 42 Leicester Tigers 28

Toulouse 61 Ulster 21

Bristol 12 Leinster 35

EPCR Challenge Cup SA teams' results

Ospreys 36 Emirates Lions 14

Toyota Cheetahs 20 Perpignan 20