>> Chris Hewett on Boks exodus
Frik du Preez, venerated as the greatest forward ever to pull on a Springbok jersey, celebrated his 85th birthday at the back end of November. So here’s the question: when will he make his debut for Sale, who are making it their business to sign every Du Preez in South Africa?
It seems certain that at some point in the coming weeks, the Premiership club will field a starting team boasting more Du Preezes than Englishmen. With four already on the books, why should Frik be the one to miss out?
The moment Robert, JP, Jean-Luc and Daniel emerge from the tunnel as one – joined, quite conceivably, by Rohan Janse van Rensburg, Faf de Klerk, below, Akker van der Merwe, Coenie Oosthuizen, Jono Ross and Cobus Wiese – the South Africanisation of professional rugby in the north-west will be just about complete, even without any meaningful contribution from the injured Lood de Jager. Will they lay on a braai in the AJ Bell Stadium car park to celebrate the new normal?
In the league table of good looks, this will send Sale plummeting towards a relegation zone most infamously inhabited by Will Stuart’s ridiculous mullet, Nic White’s surrealist Salvador Dali moustache and the All Blacks’ fluorescent footwear circa 2018.
Yet whatever this may signify for the top flight game in England, there is a broader debate to be had. Namely: what is it doing to the fabric of the sport in the land of the reigning world champions?
A month ago, one of the Bokke nation’s news websites identified eight whole teams’ worth of South Africans signed to top-end professional clubs in foreign parts. There were more than 40 of them in the Premiership alone, with another 30-odd in the Top 14 in France.
Then there were the 25 or so in Japan, almost the same number in the Celtic countries, a couple with Treviso in Italy – even a smattering among the Super Rugby franchises in Australia. And they hadn’t begun to tot up the players in the French second tier or Major
League rugby in the States.
These numbers are eye-watering. They are also unsustainable for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the economic to the emblematic, and unless the movers and shakers on the non-governing governing body known as World Rugby start thinking through the inevitable consequences of a gold rush by South African players and their agents, they will find themselves watching one of their sport’s cornerstone countries being reduced to the union equivalent of a dustbowl.
The South Africans are done with Super Rugby. They were growing increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of flying across oceans to play games of rugby nobody was much interested in and with the sport fracturing and splintering under the weight of the pandemic, they have seized the opportunity to look elsewhere for their cross-border fix.
But there is no reason to think their linkup with an already unwieldy, often joyless and largely unwatched Celtic-Italian confection on the far side of the Equator will prove any more satisfying.
If too few people cared about the Bulls playing the Crusaders in Christchurch, the excitement levels surrounding Western Province’s meeting with Zebre in Parma will be subterranean.
And at a moment when rugby should be attempting to meet its environmental responsibilities by greening itself wherever possible, it is difficult to imagine Greta Thunberg performing somersaults in triumph, let alone cracking a smile, because the Sharks are making an 11-hour flight from Durban to the United Kingdom rather than a 14-hour one to Australia.
What’s that you say? The South Africans have to play somebody, somewhere? Indeed they do. And the answer is blindingly obvious. They could spend the bulk of their time playing at home, against each other.
If we have learned anything over the recent months of misery, it is that domestic club championships matter. There is a reason why the French habitually man the barricades in defence of their Top 14 tournament, and it has nothing to do with their being obstructionist by nature, no matter what the muttering masses of home nations administrators may think. It is because the competition is front and centre in the national rugby psyche.
Increasingly, supporters in England feel much the same way about their own league. The Premiership haemorrhages money because too many players earn too much for the business model to absorb, not because the product is inherently a dud.
Even the most committed internationalists in the southern hemisphere have put themselves on-message. Last year’s Super Rugby Aotearoa jamboree in New Zealand was as super as super gets, made more appealing rather than less by the absence of Australian and South African teams. Who needs opponents from overseas when you can have a derby dust-up instead?
Of all the SANZAAR nations, South Africa has the potential to run a homebased championship at least as competitive, and possibly more captivating, than anything to be seen in Europe.
It’s not as if they don’t have the framework in place: the Currie Cup, reduced to
“South Africa could run a home championship as competitive as anything in Europe”
second-fiddle status with the emergence of Super Rugby, is every bit as venerable as its French equivalent, having been played since 1892, and could easily be restored as the country’s elite competition.
Such a move might reinvigorate the fortunes of the smaller South African unions – all those Bolands and Mpumalangas and Griqualand Wests – and create more toplevel opportunities for ambitious local players.
At a push, it might even work for the impoverished, cruelly used and abused Eastern Cape, the very patch of rugby turf that produced Freddy Turner, Jimmy White and Willem Delport either side of the Second World War, gave the great centre Danie Gerber to the game and set Siya Kolisi, below, Lukhanyo Am and Makazole Mapimpi on the road to the 2019 World Cupwinning team.
The challenge of making the sums add up would not be inconsiderable, but South Africa is hardly the only major union country wrestling with its financials. Which is where the “NGGB” comes in (or would do if it was fit for purpose, which it isn’t).
World Rugby could broker an annual single-venue, eight-team competition involving the two best-performing sides from
South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, together with the champion club from Japan and a Pacific islands outfit. This would generate a good few dollars from the broadcasters while sharpening the competitive domestic edge with an incentive worthy of the name. More usefully still, the “NGGB” could finally grow a pair by forcing through revenuesharing at Test level. By shaming the wealthiest unions in the sport into kicking their beggar-thy-neighbour protectionist habit and doing something for the common weal instead, the administrators would go a long way towards saving rugby from itself. Union is in quite enough trouble as it is, without any new variant of the self-interest virus.
This is not an argument against wanderlust. If an adventurous, open-minded spirit wants to play some rugby far away from his homeland, it is not the business of his national union, or anyone else, to place obstacles in his path.
But when we see as much of Faf de Klerk as we do of Ben Youngs, the game loses some of its mystery. We need light and shade, not light and more light.
When the Springboks won the 1995 World Cup, in the last significant act of the amateur era, our eyes were opened to a whole new cast of characters. Every member of that squad had been playing his rugby on South African soil and as a result, we knew next to nothing of Japie Mulder, Joel Stransky or Os du Randt until they hit us between the eyes.
Twenty years on, we were similarly entranced by Japan. Those familiar with the mastery of Shota Horie, Fumiaki Tanaka and Ayumu Goromaru could count themselves serious students of the game. The rest of us were blindsided, none more so than the Springboks themselves when the two countries met in Brighton on the opening weekend.
Four years later, when the South Africans regained the summit, it was almost from a standing start, given the numbers of front-line operators dipping in and out of the country at the behest of their bank balances.
Things look different now. The Boks have not played a single game since hammering England in Yokohama, their Super Rugby sojourn has reached its conclusion, many of their World Cup elite are out of the country once more and they cannot count on the British and Irish Lions heading their way any time soon.
For this to be happening to the nation at the top of rugby’s rankings is jaw-dropping, so if ever there was a time for the South Africans to rebuild from the bottom up, this is it. There may be more Du Preezes in Greater Manchester than there are in Greater Cape Town, but they will soon retrace their steps if there is something worth doing when they get there.
“When we see as much of De Klerk as we do of Ben Youngs, the game loses some mystery”