The first ever home Vodacom United Rugby Championship match for the DHL Stormers and an overseas team will not be played at the Cape team’s regular home venue of DHL Stadium (Cape Town Stadium).
* Get DStv to watch all the URC action *
With the Cape Town Cycle Tour due to take place the same day, and the finish scheduled for the same Greenpoint precinct that you find the Stadium, Western Province has been forced to change the venue of the scheduled Sunday, 13 March URC clash with Zebre Parma to Danie Craven Stadium in Stellenbosch.
It is understood that a switch of date to Saturday was not possible due to a URC rule that stipulates that there has to be an eight-day gap between matches for teams that play cross-hemisphere fixtures and have to travel from their home base overseas. Parma are due to play Ospreys in Wales seven days before the weekend put aside for the fixture.
Newlands, the Stormers’ old home ground, is also unable to host the game, as was the case when some Currie Cup games got rescheduled last season, because the ground has been feeling the effects of the Cape summer and is too dry and untended.
The Stormers/Zebre game was initially scheduled for late November last year but was postponed due to the discovery of the new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, that forced the overseas teams to hurry home due to their government’s closing borders to travel from South Africa.
The game will be the first ever competitive match ever played by the Stormers in Stellenbosch - they have played the odd pre-season friendly there in the past - and will kick off at 18.05 on that Sunday.
With it anticipated that stadiums will be opened to bigger crowds by then, it is not an ideal situation for the Stormers, who would have been looking forward to finally getting to grips with overseas opposition at their new home.
The last game they played in Cape Town against a foreign team, apart from the British and Irish Lions, was the clash with the Blues from Auckland in what turned out to be the last ever global Super Rugby match played at Newlands in March 2020.
However, in a joint statement issued by the WP Rugby Administrator and the DHL Stadium CEO, it was explained that while everything was done to try and get the game played at the original venue, it just wasn’t possible to find a solution.
“While both WP Rugby and the team at DHL Stadium tried to look at various options for staging the event at DHL Stadium on the rescheduled date, unfortunately this was not possible due to the stadium’s event calendar having a pre-existing booking,” the statement said.