The headline was right - “Sharks surrender their Challenge Cup title”. It was a wilful surrender in a game which, frankly, had they gone in even half strength they could have won against a Lyon team that weren’t that good.
Hollywoodbets Sharks coach John Plumtree made it pretty clear a while ago that his team would not be targeting the EPCR secondary trophy. Been there and done that. Last year they needed to win the trophy that was effectively secured in a final that acted as a Friday night curtain-raiser to the Saturday main event - the Investec Champions Cup final between Toulouse and Leinster at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
The Sharks played all out because they had bombed in their bread-and-butter competition, the Vodacom United Rugby Championship, and there was no other route into the prestigious Champions Cup. Which is where the Sharks, with all their money, need to be.
Their CEO at the time, Eduard Coetzee, made it plain at a media weekend in Durban in 2021 that his franchise saw winning the Champions Cup as their long-term goal.
It still is, but as Joey Mongalo, the defence coach who took charge of a very young team that played in Lyon, has acknowledged, the Durban franchise is still adjusting to playing across two competitions.
He didn’t go back to December for illustration purposes, but he might have done - it was then that Plumtree was forced to go second string to Leicester Tigers because his team had two tough URC derbies to play straight after that trip.
WEAKENED TEAMS NOT UNIQUE TO SA
Going second string to overcome logistical hurdles has become a norm - just ask Leinster, who come to South Africa just once a year in league play and yet the travel is too much for them when juxtaposed with their EPCR commitments to ever come here with a full-strength squad.
Neither is prioritising one competition over another new, or for that matter unique to South African teams.
The French have been doing it for years. With the Top 14 having such a cut-throat promotion-relegation system, with the bottom two automatically dropping out, how seriously the French sides take the EPRC competitions usually depends on where they are in their league when the European games arrive.
If they are anywhere near the relegation zone, then it is all hands on deck for the Top 14 and the EPCR, be it Champions Cup or Challenge Cup, becomes of secondary importance.
And if you are in the Challenge Cup it should be low on the list of priorities as it is just a Plate event for teams that aren’t good enough to play in the elite competition. The Vodacom Bulls and the Sharks played the Challenge Cup round of 16 games only because they ended outside of the top four in their respective Pools and therefore got knocked out of the Champions Cup.
Is winning a trophy that becomes available because you got knocked out of the group stage of a higher competition really something to boast about? Plumtree and the Sharks think not. They broke their trophy duck last year when they beat Gloucester, not ranked in the top eight clubs in England, in last year’s final.
They then also went on to win the Carling Currie Cup, something that almost happened as an after-thought for them. The only URC aligned union that appeared to be taking winning the domestic competition seriously last year was the Emirates Lions, or actually ADT Fidelity Guard Lions in that competition, who the Durbanites beat in the final.
The Sharks used the playoff phases of the Currie Cup as a pre-season preparation for the bigger competition, the URC. Much of the Currie Cup was played in what should be the South African offseason, and the side that made it into the playoffs wasn’t even coached by Plumtree, but by JP Pietersen.
It was captained by young Nick Hatton, who did not lead them in the playoffs, but was back to lead when the Sharks went young again this past weekend.
SHARKS NEVER HAD ANY BACK TO BACK AMBITION
The long and the short of it is that the Sharks have won the two less significant trophies in the past 12 months and when Plumtree referred to the URC as a big trophy it was pointed. Because it is a much more prestigious trophy.
While there were some who rather ignorantly spoke up the Sharks’s chances of making it back to back wins in the Challenge Cup, that was never going to be their intention. These months of the season are a direct contrast to the corresponding months of last season, when the Sharks were focusing on the Challenge Cup and relegating their URC commitments as a means to an end.
To be fair the Lions, who probably need it most as an avenue to the Champions Cup, never had a realistic hope of winning the Challenge Cup so it was no surprise to see them get knocked out this past weekend, but the Bulls do have an excellent chance and they appear to have a different attitude to the Sharks.
They are going all in to win the Challenge Cup and they scored a good win over Bayonne to advance to a quarterfinal against Edinburgh. Even then, the Bulls’ ambitions are down to circumstance.
If the quarterfinal was being played in Johannesburg, which would have been the case had the Lions beaten Edinburgh, Bulls director of rugby Jake White would have kept his full strength squad in Europe for the start of a crucial two-match URC tour and relied instead on the players left at home against the Lions.
For White the URC is also the more important competition and the one that can’t be sacrificed. However, the Bulls will try their best to win the Challenge Cup if they can and if the logistics don’t cause it to compromise their URC challenge they haven’t won any trophy since the times of Covid. The Sharks have, and the Stormers have (the inaugural URC in 2022).
After losing a few finals since then, such as the Rainbow Cup in 2021 and two URC finals, it probably is important for the Bulls to do what the Sharks did in London last May by breaking a trophy drought. Getting some silverware in the trophy cabinet, no matter what it is, can be a step towards building future success.
ONLY ELITE THREE CAN WIN CHAMPIONS CUP
During the Pool phase of the Champions Cup, certainly subsequent to their opening defeat to Saracens, I sometimes got the impression that White had half an eye on the Challenge Cup. And if he figured out that the Challenge Cup is winnable and the Champions Cup isn’t, he would be right.
If you take a look at the results of the Champions Cup round of 16 it emerges that there is an elite group of teams that can win that competition and the rest are also-rans who make up the numbers. Some would include Toulon in a top four because they hit 70, but for my money, and given that two time winners La Rochelle have faded, there are only three teams that can win Europe’s most prestigious prize - Leinster, who put 62 points on Harlequins, reigning champions Toulouse and Bordeaux. Both those French teams were short of their best this past weekend and yet won easily.
No-one is going to beat them and certainly there’s no South African side that can challenge those sides in an overseas playoff game so if trophies are White’s currency it probably made a lot of sense for him to drop to a competition where the trophy is winnable.
The Bulls are challenging strongly in the URC and have got to the final twice in three seasons but realistically it is going to be much harder this season to keep Leinster away from a trophy that they dominated when it was the PRO14 and which they continue to dominate in league play.
The Challenge Cup, with the also rans from the various leagues and teams that have been knocked out of the Champions Cup competing, is certainly the easiest route to silverware if that is what you are looking for.