LIONS CAN BE ENVIED
Timeshare ties you to a particular week, which is sometimes a pity. My holiday in the Drakensberg, which is really just a change of working environment, might be more of a holiday next week. There’s a good chance there will be a break for all South African teams as the rest of the participants in the EPCR competitions head into the quarterfinals.
Okay, so I strongly suspect the DHL Stormers may have a chance in their Investec Champions Cup round of 16 game in Toulon. That’s just based on the noises coming out of Toulon, where a long sequence of defeats has left the home team battling for survival in the Top 14. Faced with the prospect of relegation from their bread and butter competition, the French sides often find themselves having to make a choice on what they prioritise.
But if the Stormers do have a sniff I am not sure about the other two teams, with the Vodacom Bulls going to Glasgow and the Hollywoodbets Sharks appearing to have prioritised the Vodacom URC and sent a weaker team to Galway for their EPCR Challenge Cup round of 16 clash.
With the URC in mind, it is the Fidelity DriveSure Lions that should be envied. They haven’t had to fly anywhere this week and already know they also have next week off. They can focus wholly on what will be an important clash with Glasgow Warriors, who may have a hangover from two successive Champions Cup knock-out games, on 18 April.
SACRIFICE IS UNAVOIDABLE FOR SA TEAMS
Talk is cheap, but it was good to see both John Dobson and Johan Ackermann state that their teams will be going all out in their Investec Champions Cup round of 16 games.
If the greatest club rugby competition on earth, as it is regularly advertised as, is ever going to live up to that billing in this country, the local teams are going to have to start getting the results that will capture the public imagination. So far, and we’re into the fourth season of South Africa’s participation in the EPCR competitions, that hasn’t happened.
The Stormers, Sharks and the Bulls have all made one quarterfinal, but that’s as far as anyone has got. Last year no local team made it out of the group stage in the Champions Cup, with the Stormers dropping out completely because they finished sixth in their group while the Sharks and Bulls finished fifth and ended up playing in the Challenge Cup round of 16. Neither of them got anywhere, and anyway it is the Champions Cup that counts.
It counts a lot to the European teams, which was why the then Bulls coach Jake White invoked the ire of the English media when he sent an understrength team to the Northampton quarterfinal two seasons ago. Sending understrength teams to away games is a trend for many teams, not just SA ones, but hypocrisy is something sections of the overseas media are quite expert at so they let Jake have it.
Jake’s fault in that instance wasn’t what he did, but what he said. If I did a thesis on the art of speaking complete rubbish, what coaches say when SA teams are selected for Champions Cup or Challenge Cup games would be a big part of the study.
Even if a team is clearly a B team, the coaches won’t say so because they don’t want to be seen to be disrespecting the competition. They will say they are going for the win and are confident, and it is usually complete nonsense. Jake was just too honest by pretty much admitting that his team was there to make up the numbers and that the URC was his team’s priority.
He was right to send a B team because his team was contending for the URC and it wasn’t a good time to be sending his top players overseas if it wasn’t going to compromise his team’s race for a top spot on the URC log. Also at that point all SA teams had to play knock-out games away. The local teams do enough travelling in a season and the more you do the more it compromises something.
If he didn’t figure it out for himself, Dobson could have filled White in after his own experience the previous season, when making the quarterfinal against Exeter at Sandy Park probably led the Stormers to drop an important home URC game against Munster a week later.
That’s the thing with SA competing across both competitions - there’s always a sacrifice to be made. And there is now too. If the Stormers beat Toulon at the weekend and advance to an overseas quarterfinal against Glasgow Warriors, they will be playing that game a week before an important home URC game against Connacht.
And if the Stormers win and the Bulls win in the later game at the Scotstoun, then there is a Cape Town quarterfinal between the Stormers and Bulls to look forward to. That will be great for the marketing of the competition in this country. But where will it leave the Bulls in their URC challenge given that they have to be back in Wales the following week for an important URC game?
THE QUID PRO QUO
As the then Sharks coach John Plumtree once said, humans are not robots. There is a limit to what the body can take physically. There’s also a welfare aspect. So I was pleased to hear the Stormers assistant coach Rito Hlungwani calling for welfare issues to be taken more seriously in rugby in this country.
To paraphrase, he made the point that coaches and players have families and that all the travelling, which SA rugby players and coaches do a lot more of than their peers overseas, takes a toll. Yes, I can hear people saying “But they get paid well and do a privileged job”. That may be so, but even well paid people are human and there’s a strain that has to impact performance.
It is not all negative though, for by playing in two competitions the SA franchises/clubs are being forced to build the depth that is necessary to compete on both fronts. And while the Pool games involving the Stormers against Harlequins and the Sharks against Toulouse in December weren’t a good advert to how much depth has been created thus far, I believe it will happen. And is starting to happen. There’s a gold mine of talent in this country.
If the SA teams get to the point where they have two almost equal strength teams that can alternate between games, tours and competitions, then surely that will be huge for SA rugby as a whole and ultimately the Springboks.
SHARKS FACED A VERY DIFFICULT DECISION
The Sharks did win the EPCR Challenge Cup two seasons ago, but it was noteworthy only because it enabled the Sharks to qualify for the following season’s Champions Cup. The Sharks made a bit of a marketing meal of it. They were correct in saying it was the first SA win in an EPCR competition, but it was akin to winning the B Section.
The reason the other top local teams, meaning the Stormers and Bulls in this instance because they are the only two sides to have been a constant in the Champions Cup, didn’t win it was because they were in the A Section.
And the Sharks pretty much summed up what they thought of winning the Challenge Cup when the following season they didn’t really bother with it when they were strong on the URC log at the time they dropped to the secondary EPCR competition. Given the squad that is understood to have been sent to Galway, that is the case again - although this time it is for a different reason.
The Sharks faced a tough choice - they can get into the Champions Cup the way they did in 2024, or they can go for broke in the URC, where they are seven log points behind the top eight bracket that will give them Champions Cup qualification through the more conventional route.
It looks like they have chosen the latter, and it may be something that will come back to bite them if they don’t get the 20 log points from their four remaining URC games that may be what they need to get to eighth. And even then it isn’t in their hands for they will have to rely on teams above them losing two of their four remaining games.
THE URC KEEPS EVERYONE ENGAGED TO THE END
Back in the early days of Super Rugby, when working for a Cape newspaper and focusing therefore mostly on the Stormers, I used to make a bit of a deal of where the team stood at the Easter weekend. As in it was a good year if the Stormers were still in contention when Easter arrived, remembering of course that in those days the Super Rugby season started in late February and ended at the end of May. And it was a bad year if they weren’t.
When the team you supported was out of contention for playoff places that early, it did become a bit of a yawn. It is a completely different vibe in the URC. With Champions Cup places up for grabs, there’s a separate competition within a competition, the one around making the top eight, that is quite apart from the one between the teams looking for a top two spot, or for the coveted top four finish that secures a home quarterfinal. It keeps more teams and eyes engaged until the end of the competition.
This season is particularly intriguing when it comes to the race for top eight. Right now the Stormers look assured of a top eight finish, and it is the Lions who are the next most secure of the SA teams as they currently fill fifth position. Given the way they are playing, the Lions may well retain a place in the top five, but there is a catch - their remaining four fixtures are Glasgow Warriors at home, Connacht at home and two Irish teams, including Leinster, away. Of those, the Connacht game is the only one I am completely confident they will win, and even then they are going to have to be at the top of their game.
The 10th placed Sharks’ remaining fixtures are Ospreys and Edinburgh away before they finish off at home against the two Italian teams. They have more chance of winning all their games than the Lions do, and they will need to if they are to have any chance. Probably with a bonus point with each win too.
The eighth placed Bulls have to lose two of their remaining four games if the Sharks are to catch them and I don’t think they will. I also think the two losing bonus points Munster stole at the death at Loftus the other day makes them pretty safe.
With a 10 point lead on the Sharks but such tough games to play, it could well be the Lions who the Sharks have the best chance of catching. At the same time, it is at least in the Lions’ hands. If they pick up bonus point wins in their two home games then they are almost home and dry. It is not in the Sharks’ hands, for even if they do pick up 20 points, they require other teams to slip up.
DELAYED SQUAD ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE DISRESPECTFUL TO FANS
Well done to Johan Ackermann. The Bulls coach didn’t just say his team would go all out in the Champions Cup, he put meat to the bones of that by announcing his squad, which had 14 Springboks in it. So at least Bulls fans know what they are getting this weekend, they know their team will be a strong one.
The Stormers most likely too, but still would it really harm the Stormers if they also announced their travelling squad so that the Cape Town people that they aim to make smile can also be informed and be respected?
Stormers assistant coach Rito Hlungwani explained the non announcement of a tour squad down to the fact that “No one else does it so we don’t do it”. Well, the Bulls do it, and frankly everyone should do it. At least you should if you want to sell the sport at that level, and given the empty seats we’ve seen at Champions Cup games in SA, it is a level that does need selling.
COMPARING SOCCER WITH RUGBY IS NOT COMPARING APPLES WITH APPLES
The EPCR protocol is that teams have to be announced all together at 2pm on the eve of the game. When I enquire about that, the response is that if English Premier League soccer managers can announce their teams just before kickoff, which is true, then Champions Cup or Challenge Cup coaches should be able to do the same.
My response is to ask the rugby people, if they are so keen to mimic soccer, to take a closer look at that sport. West Ham have really struggled of late, and could find themselves dropping out of the Premier League. But are there ever as many open spaces at their home ground, the stadium built for the 2012 London Olympics, for a game as there are at SA rugby stadiums for all but the biggest derby matches?
You can’t be running a sport that desperately needs selling and use another sport that most emphatically doesn’t need as much selling as your excuse for inserting a certain protocol.
And when it comes to touring squads, there are no protocols. Like Ackermann did, you can announce a squad before departure. You also have to question the point of keeping a squad secret when all coaches surely know there are ways to find out who is in a touring squad. Apart from local liaison officers who work with the touring teams, you just need to phone the hotel and ask them who is on their guest list.
The bottom line for me - if Rassie Erasmus can name his team for a big test match at the start of the week, which he invariably does, then surely so can the club coaches.
ITALY BECOMING A RUGBY COUNTRY
I saw a good line in the common sections of one of the UK newspapers I subscribe to - “Italy is becoming a rugby country.” Indeed, the Boks, who play Italy in the Pool phase of next year’s World Cup, had better beware, for there might be a reason for that nation to intensify their interest in rugby, for their absence from the FIFA World Cup finals has been extended by at least another four years.
When they lost their play-off game against Bosnia-Herzegovina in Zenica on Tuesday night on penalties, Italy became the first former champions in World Cup history to miss three consecutive tournaments. It means their drought will extend to 2030 at the earliest, a full 16 years on from their last finals appearance.
It seems so weird - it wasn’t that long ago that Italy won a Euro final against England at Wembley. Mind you, their rugby team were successful against England more recently than that and are on the rise despite their final game hiccup against a resurgent Wales.