Presence of Farrell will light up matches in SA

Owen Farrell is done with international rugby for now, but hopefully we will see him come to SA with his Saracens team for Saturday’s Champions Cup clash with the Bulls because this country needs the injection of interest in the competition that should bring.

Hopefully, if the now former England captain and flyhalf gets to play at Loftus the crowd won’t boo him, though that wouldn’t bother the 32-yearold. It is the way his own turned on him at the recent World Cup in France, with England fans booing him when the teams were introduced to the crowd, that was apparently the tipping point.

Farrell’s unpopularity was fed by the line taken by mainstream media writers in the UK, yet it is social media that has made the higher echelons of professional sport a savage place and that contributes most to the kind of mental health issues that prompted Farrell to announce last week that he is taking a break from the international game.

As someone who started out in sports writing in 1990, when rugby was still amateur and before the advent of social media, I have seen how the nature of the challenge faced by the top sportspeople has changed. There were things I wrote when I was a youngster covering rugby for the Natal Mercury and even after that at The Cape Argus that in retrospect I cringe over, but at least in those days the players that copped it knew from whence it came and it was less all pervasive.

Certain ethics are adhered to in mainstream journalism, and back in those days there were also mature sports editors who would ensure you adhered to those ethics. The criticism was limited to specific platforms, the administrators in sport permitted more interaction between journalists and the people we were writing about than is the case now, when everything has become so impersonal and interactions so managed.

Often in my early years in Durban there would be a call from an irate player who had been on the wrong side of my pen. It came with the territory. We’d have a chat about it, we’d get to understand each other. There was a human side to the interaction that I thought about when some England players said the media had portrayed Farrell wrongly.

Could that be because nowadays the media is exposed to players only in press conferences, at which they are coached to push a wooden party line that frankly does diddly-squat for the selling of the game or the selling of players as personalities?

If Farrell had a more interactive relationship with the rugby media in his country like in the days of yore, maybe there would have been more understanding. Maybe then he would have been portrayed in a different light, and the sewer rats, as one UK rugby writer so aptly labelled social media trolls, wouldn’t have had fuel for their invective.

The nasty atmosphere that has enveloped rugby and led to death threats to referee Wayne Barnes and Springbok player Cobus Reinach, among others, and has led to Farrell’s decision, should be a concern to everyone in rugby. It is just a sport, for goodness’ sake.

What should also be a concern, more mundanely but also more specifically for SA rugby as it heads into its second season of the Champions Cup, is the standing of that competition in the public’s eyes.

It was hard to believe that in 2022 the high-status European competition needed to be sold to the local rugby public, but it became clear that it does. Just as SA’s involvement in a European competition, which let’s be honest makes no geographic sense, should also be sold to many doubters in the European rugby public.

It doesn’t help the sell when SA teams go to Europe understrength, and when they come here understrength. It doesn’t just happen in the Champions Cup of course, and it should be concerning that the best team in the United Rugby Championship, Leinster, has yet to come here with anything near a full-strength squad.

The logistics about the extensive travel militates mitigates against it, and will do so again, with the plum fixture between the Stormers and LaRochelle being a case in point. The game in Cape Town is set for just six days after LaRochelle re-enact 2022’s epic final against Leinster on the other side of the world, with the Stormers playing at Leicester Tigers the same day.

With home ground advantage so important, it would be understandable if the Stormers went understrength to Leicester and LaRochelle came understrength to Cape Town, but how does that help the competition catch on? That’s why I say I hope Farrell plays for Saracens on Saturday, and Maro Itoje and the rest of Saracens’ England players too.

We need to see the star players coming here if the competition is going to capture the attention that it should.