TALKING POINT: The fuss of getting there should promote Champions Cup

The Vodacom United Rugby Championship is on a sharp upward growth spurt and the third season of the competition has been the best yet in terms of excitement and intrigue heading into the final rounds of league play.

The crowd of in excess of 30 000 that pitched at the DHL Stadium in Cape Town for the game between the DHL Stormers and Emirates Lions was a bit surprising to me and also underlined the growth in interest.

You might consider that an odd thing to say. The Stormers do attract big crowds, and always have done. But this past weekend’s game was a little different because of the odd time of day, for a Stormers game at least, that it was played. It kicked off at 1:45PM, meaning it was a lunch time game, and that meant there was a clash with the several derbies that were being played by the southern suburbs schools at around the same time.

Kick off times and schedules are dictated by television these days, and I do know who I work for, but the early kick-offs are challenging for the franchises in their quest to draw in big crowds. Recently there was a 2PM URC kick-off at Loftus that coincided with the big schools game between Affies and Grey College down the road and it was clear it had an impact on the crowd.

WATCHING BIG GAMES INSPIRES SCHOOL PLAYERS

Stormers loose-forward BJ Dixon, speaking before the occasion of his landmark 50th cap, spoke about how he’d grown up as a Stormers supporter and how watching them had inspired his rugby career. So maybe more co-operation around kick-off times between schools and unions/franchises would be mutually beneficial.

For instance, my old school Northwood played Westville this past weekend at a time that clashed with the Sharks/Bulls game (not exactly the same time but close enough to make it impossible to be at both). It was also the Westville old boys day, so there would have been a large crowd for the event, many of whom would also have liked to have been at Hollywoodbets Kings Park.

Unlike in the Cape, in my school days first team games were always played on Saturday afternoons - except on those Saturdays that Natal were playing at Kings Park. Then the main schools game would kick off at 11am. I can well remember future Springbok and long time most capped Natal/Sharks player, Hugh Reece-Edwards, who was in matric and captain of what was then the Northlands first team when I was in Standard 6, coming along to Kings Park with other first team players in the afternoon after they’d played to watch Natal from a similar vantage point to mine in the Umgeni end part of the ground.

Watching the star players was beneficial in an inspirational way to Reece-Edwards and the other first team players from all Natal schools of that time (it was 1979), and the timing also benefited those of us who enjoyed watching the schools in the morning and the men in the afternoon.

URC INTEREST CUTS THROUGH THE CHALLENGES

Okay, this is starting to appear like a long digression and is obviously something I want to get off my chest, but it’s not really such a digression. The point is that given the different factors at play, and the popularity of school rugby in this country, the interest in the URC, which does sometimes fit into time slots we will have to become more accustomed to, has become rudely healthy.

When it comes to the Investec Champions Cup, however, the interest has yet to reach the level of interest in the URC, which is weird to rugby supporters in Europe, where the level of focus is the other way around.

This was something touched upon by Eben Etzebeth, who captained the Sharks back into the Champions Cup when he led them to victory in the Challenge Cup final, when he said South Africans don’t yet understand just what a big competition the Champions Cup is.

Some might consider the Sharks’ celebrations at winning the Challenge Cup a bit over the top. After all, in that competition you are playing teams who ended eighth or lower in their leagues the season before, and with Edinburgh, who they beat in the quarterfinal, having failed to make it into the top eight in this edition of the URC, they never played anyone that was higher than eighth this season either.

With their star players, and all Challenge Cup games played at full strength, it would have been a failure if the Sharks didn’t win the trophy. On its own, winning the Challenge Cup was the same as Natal winning the Currie Cup B Section in the years after their 1981 relegation. Who remembers their B Section wins? What is more remembered is they never won the promotion-relegation games that would have got them back into the A Section.

That’s the thing though, and that’s why the Sharks celebrated like they did - the players and staff know how important it is to be in the Champions Cup, and that’s what winning the Challenge Cup did for them. Etzebeth wasn’t far wrong when he described the Champions Cup as “the World Cup of club rugby.”

EMOTION EXPENDED SHOULD CONNECT FANS WITH ELITE COMP

The Lions obviously know how important it is to be in the Champions Cup too, which was why they showed such abject despair when they came so near and yet so far in their final league game against the Stormers.

Which cues the main point - the fuss made by the Sharks and the effort put in by the Lions in these final weeks of the season with a Champions Cup place as their focus, will surely play some role in connecting fans of those teams to the more elite of the two EPCR competitions.

Just as the emotion that followed the Stormers’ agonising defeat to La Rochelle in their round of 16 Champions Cup game in April should put more bums on seats when the competition comes back to DHL Stadium later in the year, so the elation of the Sharks should spark some kind of connect between their fans and a competition they belong in given their marquee players.

Lions fans won’t get to see Champions Cup rugby next year but at the end of this season there was a tangible goal within their grasp that they narrowly missed out on. Just like Chelsea’s new coach has been recruited with the brief to get his team back into the Champions League, meaning a top four finish in the Premier League, so the Lions’ immediate focus will be not on winning the URC itself but on the top eight finish that will get them into the Champions Cup.

Unlike English soccer, there is no relegation to add extra interest and angst for supporters of teams outside the top end of the URC, but the magnitude of the prize that comes with a top eight finish adds a considerable layer of interest and it is one of the aspects of the competition that make the URC far more interesting than Super Rugby was when that was SA’s staple competition.