At the latter stages of the first year of the Vodacom United Rugby Championship, when the South African teams were on the charge en route to securing three of the top five log positions, there were warning calls made from both here and overseas regarding what was to come this year.
From memory, Leinster coach Leo Cullen was particularly forthright after his team lost to the DHL Stormers in Cape Town last April. He congratulated the Stormers and said he welcomed the South African challenge in a competition his team had dominated, but added the cautionary note that it would be a lot harder once the likes of the Stormers had to balance the URC with the Heineken Champions Cup.
Cullen was the perfect person to talk. He’d come to South Africa with an under-strength team because his men were due to face a European quarterfinal against Leicester Tigers upon their return home.
And it wasn’t as if Stormers coach John Dobson, or for that matter any of the other coaches didn’t know it. Dobson selected more players in the first eight games of the season than any other URC coach, and it was by design. He was fearful at the end of the 2021/2022 term that he might find the balancing act difficult, and felt then that just staying in the top seven and remaining in Europe might be a tough challenge the following season.
CHALLENGES FORESEEN A YEAR AGO ARE REAL
As it has turned out, Dobson’s selection policy of spreading the net worked wonders, and while the Cell C Sharks and the Vodacom Bulls struggled, the Cape side qualified again for the elite European competition with ease. But now, with the end line in sight in the second year of the URC, and Dobson and the Stormers seeking a repeat of last year where they finished runners up and thus secured both a home quarterfinal and semifinal, the reality foreseen 12 months ago has come back to bite.
And it is a much more difficult balancing act than that faced by Cullen. The European teams, except when they come to South Africa, don’t have to factor in the travel as much of a challenge as the South Africans do. For them, all venues are within a maximum of two hours flight away. Often they are just a train journey and can be done on the same day.
Dobson said after his team lost by a narrow margin to Munster at the weekend, thus surrendering their long unbeaten run at DHL Stadium, that he couldn’t put his finger on it, “but something was off”.
Yet maybe he answered that question himself when at another point of the same press conference he admitted his team couldn't continue to get by on just one training session a week.
“That was one of the contributing factors to our maul defence being so poor today, when you have a proper training week you can fix that sort of thing but not when your training time is limited,” said the Stormers coach.
What was even more telling was his admission that it is a good thing in terms of his team’s URC ambitions that they did not win the quarterfinal against Exeter Chiefs.
“If we had been going to La Rochelle the week after next and playing a Champions Cup quarterfinal in the week between the final URC league game and the URC quarterfinal that would have just been too much,” he said.
Of course, the Stormers would have won the Munster game had Manie Libbok had his place-kicking boots laced on. There’s no question of that. They made other elementary errors that cost them. But somehow, with the travel in mind, it always seemed likely that the Stormers’ failure to score the points they needed to in the middle stages of the match when they were dominant and had Munster on the rack would prove a turning point in the game.
SHARKS WERE OFF THEIR GAME TOO
There was a lot more energy in the Stormers’ performance in comparison to in Exeter, but as Dobson says, there was something off. And although they won, there was also something horribly wrong with the Sharks in their game against Benetton in Durban. Given how they played in their Champions Cup quarterfinal against Toulouse, well at least for the first 67 minutes of that game, you’d have expected the Sharks to put Benetton to the sword at their home ground of HollywoodBets Kings Park.
Instead we saw them returning to their Jekyll and Hyde ways, with the intensity of the start in Toulouse replaced with a passivity that allowed the Italians to take a 14-0 lead after just seven minutes. Indeed, the two coastal games were very similar - in both of them the visitors took handy early leads. The difference being that the Stormers were playing against Munster, who were far more challenging to play catch up against than Benetton were.
LIONS MAY HAVE BEEN IMPACTED TOO
Even in the game played in Johannesburg there were questions that could be asked that might have answers related to travel fatigue. It is after all later in the game that travel fatigue often hits, and while against Leinster you can never say you have the game won, and they proved that once more, it was the Lions who looked leaden footed at the very point you’d have expected the altitude to be their strongest ally.
Of course they were only playing Zebre, and were always expected to win by a big score, but it may not be coincidence that the one team that did not have to travel the previous week, the Vodacom Bulls, were the side that best kept their energy levels consistent over an entire 80 minutes.
BIG CHALLENGES GOING FORWARD
Speaking of the Bulls, it was hard not to think back to their director of rugby Jake White’s comments at the start of the Champions Cup as the South African hopes were being unravelled. White justified his decision not to select full strength Bulls teams for his opening fixtures against Lyon and Exeter on the basis that both the travel challenge and disparity in financial wealth made it impossible to compete with the bigger teams in Europe and that winning the Champions Cup was nigh impossible.
He pointed to the fact that while the overseas clubs had a budget of around R180-million, his franchise only worked on a budget of R70-million. And of course there are salary caps to be countenanced in South Africa that make it even more difficult to lure marquee players.
During the quarterfinals of both the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup it was noticeable how the overseas teams often had overseas players in key positions. And at DHL Stadium this past weekend Munster effectively won the game because of the efforts in the lineouts of their two South African locks, RG Snyman and Jean Kleyn. The former started his big time career at the Stormers.
The South African teams don’t have the financial clout to lure overseas players, and even if they did, there is red tape to get through here that would make an infusion of foreign talent far more difficult here than it is overseas.
What the South African teams really need to do if they want to compete in both Europe and in the URC is to ensure that some of the 300 professional players from South Africa currently playing overseas come home, and that they don’t lose any more players to overseas clubs. The outflow of players to overseas clubs - and let’s not forget Stormers captain Steven Kitshoff is heading to Ulster after this season and last season’s top Stormers player Warrick Gelant is in France, not to mention a phalanx of former Bulls players - makes succession planning for the local coaches difficult if not nigh impossible.
The solution requires money, and that is going to be a massive challenge.
WEEKEND VODACOM RUGBY UNITED CHAMPIONSHIP RESULTS
Cell C Sharks 43 Benetton 33
Glasgow Warriors 12 Scarlets 9
Ulster 40 Dragons 19
Vodacom Bulls 73 Zebre 12
Emirates Lions 36 Leinster 39
DHL Stormers 24 Munster 26
Connacht 38 Cardiff 19
Edinburgh 45 Ospreys 21