Stormers and Bulls show the way in Champions Cup
When the Bulls ended the Bordeaux Begles’ unbeaten run at Loftus at the weekend it ensured the second season of SA’s participation in the Champions Cup will end with SA remaining a frontier yet to be crossed by an overseas team in the pool phase.
That is something to be proud of considering that among the victims on SA soil this season have been the two-time reigning champions, La Rochelle, who fell to the Stormers last month, and the English champions and past winners Saracens, who lost to the Bulls at about the same time, the Sale Sharks and the red-hot form team in Europe, Bordeaux.
Given that record, the Stormers and Bulls should be heavily favoured to win their home round of 16 matches on the first weekend of April, when they will play for the semifinal spot that eluded SA teams in the 2022/23 season.
The Sharks’ nonparticipation this season because they failed to make the cut last season is a step back. Regarding the teams participating, there should be at least one more SA side in the elite Champions Cup. To get there you have to come in the top eight of the United Rugby Championship (URC), and the Lions are better placed than the Durban team to make it.
ANOTHER ROUTE
There is another route open to the Sharks, as the winner of the secondary Challenge Cup qualifies for the next season’s Champions Cup. But there are good teams dropping into the round of 16 after finishing fifth in their Champions Cup pools, so that is far from a gimme.
Regardless of whether they go all the way, the experience of playing in the Challenge Cup should have impressed on the Sharks the importance of being in the Champions Cup. There is just much less focus on the Challenge Cup, and some of the teams are substandard.
There was talk of a turnaround for the Sharks when they beat Oyonnax at home, but not only are the French team near the bottom of the Top 14, they didn’t send their top team to Durban. And neither did Pau.
The tendency for visiting sides not to send some of their top players isn’t helping the one big negative to SA’s participation in the Champions Cup so far, which is that it is taking a while for the competition to catch on with the local rugby public.
When the Stormers beat Sale in Cape Town there was a crowd of 25,000 to see them do it. The game was played in a great atmosphere, but the crowd wasn’t nearly as big as those that turned out for the URC derbies against the Bulls and the Sharks. And while Jake White hyped up the Bulls game against Bordeaux into something akin to a Test match, the large empty spaces on the open stand picked up by the TV cameras wasn’t a good message to send to the many overseas critics who question the cache the competition has in SA.
It was a similar story when the Stormers beat La Rochelle. There were only 11,000 at that game, a small crowd by Cape Town standards, and they were playing against a team that included French and other international players we don’t get to see play here every day.
White, who was an assistant at Transvaal back in the embryonic days of Super Rugby, has been disappointed with the turnouts for Champions Cup games at Loftus, but he believes it will rectify itself in time. As it did in Super Rugby. “It took a while back then for people to identify with the competition and the new teams their teams were playing against but eventually it took hold,” he said.
The Bulls director of rugby is probably right, but an additional factor may come into play — not only are South Africans still getting used to playing against new rivals, they are also still coming to terms with some aspects of summer rugby.
HOT SUN
Mid-afternoon games in December or January may help the home sides but it doesn’t make for a pleasant experience for paying spectators sitting in the hot sun. Some of the television angles at Loftus at the weekend showed that the shaded stand was well populated. And it was the same when the Stormers played La Rochelle. That afternoon provided perfect beach weather and mates who went to the game and sat in the sun because they hadn’t booked for a shaded area didn’t enjoy the experience.
I would take a lot of convincing that the old winter season isn’t the best time to be playing and watching rugby in SA (ironically maybe the Western Cape is the exception) but if you have to play in summer, the games shouldn’t be scheduled for earlier than 5.30pm. The two big Stormers derbies that attracted such big crowds over the festive season were both evening games, and that is when they should always be in summer.