The players in just about all the teams that kick off their 2023 Carling Currie Cup campaign will have the Vodacom United Rugby Championship somewhere in their thoughts, just in different ways.
The international cross-hemisphere franchise/club competition is taking a break for three weeks, and for once the Vodacom Bulls’ Jake White and the DHL Stormers’ John Dobson appear to be in complete agreement on something - this period can be used to strengthen the respective URC challenges once it resumes.
White reckons that three weeks is a long time to take off and then expect to be sharp when the competition resumes, and he has experience of that. His decision to rest his top players for two Heineken Champions Cup games appeared to backfire when his full strength returned after three weeks off to play a URC derby against the Stormers just before Christmas and they lost badly.
For Dobson, he has those thoughts when applied to his fringe players who might be called into action later in the competition but who he feels might not have played enough.
MUCH NEEDED BREAK FOR SOME PLAYERS
“Obviously we will flag those players who have played a lot of URC and they will take a break now but there are some players who need game time and they will be playing,” said Dobson.
Growing depth should be the main emphasis of all four URC teams in the domestic competition. And the 2022 Currie Cup winning coach, Jimmy Stonehouse of the Pumas, summed up the attitude of a lot of the players in the non-URC provincial teams when he spoke last year of the Currie Cup and his team being a stepping stone to playing in the URC.
Stonehouse said then that he recognised that if his team was successful the top players would be lured to the franchises, and he accepted that. So must the other three provinces in the competition - the Griffons, Cheetahs and Griquas. There was a time when the smaller unions could rely on surplus players from the bigger unions coming to them in a quest to get game time.
However, the timing of the Currie Cup and the other competitions has now made it possible for players who play at the bigger unions but are not used in the franchise competitions to get game time in the domestic competition. That makes the bigger unions more attractive, and while Stonehouse had already lost Willie Engelbrecht to the Stormers and Western Province even before the flanker led his team magnificently in the Currie Cup final against Griquas in Kimberley, their opponents knew that key player Stef Ungerer was going to be joining Engelbrecht in the Cape.
PROMOTION AN INCENTIVE FOR PLAYERS
That’s the carrot for many players across the board in the Currie Cup - promotion to the international franchise competition, and they will be playing as much for that as the coveted trophy that is awarded to the winner of the oldest provincial competition in world rugby.
The Pumas’ win last year though will also have inspired the rank and file players at the provinces into believing that glory is possible, and those who say the Currie Cup has been devalued will have found it hard to make that argument to the celebrating people of Mpumalanga last June.
Visiting there two months later for the Springbok/All Black Rugby Championship game the upswing in rugby awareness in Nelspruit was very evident, and we were told that the Currie Cup was still doing a tour of the town and the region and being paraded at business and corporate events.
The competition starts with a central union derby between last year’s beaten finalists, The Windhoek Draught Griquas and the Toyota Cheetahs in Kimberley this afternoon. There is going to be a lot of Sunday rugby this season and this Sunday we see the Bulls hosting the champion Airlink Pumas while one of the plum games of the weekend should be Western Province’s trip to Johannesburg on Saturday.
WP have been underwhelming the last few seasons while the Stormers have flown, and Dobson is hoping to inject some of the franchise excellence into the Province team as they go in quest of their 35th domestic title.
Weekend Black Label Carling Currie Cup fixtures
Windhoek Draught Griquas v Toyota Cheetahs (Kimberley, Friday 16.00)
Cell C Sharks v NovaVit Griffons (Durban, Saturday 13.30)
Fidelity ADT Lions v DHL Western Province (Johannesburg, Saturday 16.00)
Bulls XV v Airlink Pumas (Pretoria, Sunday 13.00)