Kings for just one day

The day after the match between the British and Irish Lions and the Southern Kings I found myself driving between Port Elizabeth and Durban.

An 11 and a half hour drive might sound like a crazy alternative to a one hour and five minute flight, but it was a decision taken a long time ago and had more to do with the cost of hired cars, and freedoms, than aeroplane avoidance.

The reason I am telling you about the drive is because it was a good juxtaposition with the hype the day before about the Kings and their right to be a Super 15 participant. For the additional Super 15 franchise should surely be determined not by the size of your stadium, as some Kings officials seem to think, but by the size and the demographics of your catchment area and potential target market.

If it was done just on the size of the stadium, Port Elizabeth wouldn’t stand a hope, for Melbourne, assuming a franchise based there could get use of the MCG, would then win hands down.

I know the Eastern Cape well after studying in Grahamstown for five years in the 1980s, so it was not news to me, but the drive did remind me of just how vast the Eastern Cape is. Of the 11 and a half hours driven on Wednesday, eight and a half of those hours were driven through the Eastern Cape – and in a relatively straight line on a road with an average 120 km speed limit.

If you consider that my drive from Cape Town on the Monday saw me cross into the Eastern Cape about half an hour south east of Plettenberg Bay, the length of time spent driving from one side of the Eastern Cape coast to the other was a full 10 hours. That is a lot of time, and a lot of kilometres.

If you travel inland, towards Queenstown, Aliwal North, Craddock or Burgersdorp, you are also in for a long journey. So the point doesn’t really need to be laboured – the Eastern Cape covers a heck of a large area.

Combine Port Elizabeth, East London, King Williams Town/Bisho, Butterworth, Umtata with other centres which are smaller but offer a lot in terms of people being educated there, places such as Grahamstown, Alice and Queenstown, then you are talking about a massive population catchment area.

And yes, it is true what the propaganda gurus working for the Kings say – this is mostly rugby country (not sure about the Transkei, but the rest certainly is). It was while driving home from a braai at Kenton-on-Sea during my time in Grahamstown 24 years ago that I first spotted what was in those days a unique sight for a Durbanite – black people playing rugby.

All of this suggests what the Kings supporters say it does – if the transformation goals of our rugby are to be realised, the sport in this region needs to be nourished. A Super 15 franchise would certainly do that, and while driving through quaint but dusty little towns like Peddie, Idutywa, Qumbu, Mount Frere and past Mount Ayliff I imagined the excitement that could be caused there if a “Kings roadshow” came through there before a Super 15 season. The area is crying out for it.

But I have to change tack now for I know this is all getting overly romantic, which much of my Youth Day at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium was. Time to introduce a touch of reality here – the team that played the Lions in Port Elizabeth was not an Eastern Cape team.

Indeed, you could argue that it was hardly even a South African team, made up as it was of so many overseas based mercenaries. Which is essentially the problem for South African rugby in the quest to include a sixth team in the SANZAR competition – where are you going to get the players from when the biggest lure for the player not good enough for the Springboks remains the Euro and the Pound?

The idea that the Eastern Cape is suddenly going to be able to afford top players is pie in the sky. The only company name on the jersey of the Kings team on Tuesday was Megapro. That suggests they were not even able to get a sponsor for this one off game.

Much of the Eastern Cape is depressed economically, and while much can be made of the fact that the 35 000 that turned up at the new stadium was the biggest crowd of the tour so far, the ticket prices were also by far the cheapest so far.

The PE public showed their appetite for rugby in recent seasons by turning up in their droves for the occasional test matches. One particular game I remember well was the 2005 clash with France. There was atmosphere at that test like I have seen almost nowhere else outside of Marseilles.

But the key word used in that previous paragraph was “occasional”. Can an Eastern Cape franchise, particularly one that is battling, sustain a big crowd week after week? I am not sure about that, for my abiding memory of watching Eastern Province during the university years was of the crowds rushing to the exits 20 minutes from the end when EP were down on the scoreboard.

Maybe Super 15 is too much to aim at right now. Shouldn’t the Kings just be aiming to establish themselves in a strength versus strength, six team Currie Cup, and becoming competitive at that level? The rest can follow after that.

The bottom line is that a number of factors need to be taken into consideration before we glibly accept the claim that last Tuesday proved that the Eastern Cape deserves a franchise. On what basis? Of the 35 000 who turned up for this one-off, a liberal percentage were wearing Lions jerseys.

My hunch is that until we have a guarantee that there is a sponsor and that hence there is the means to recruit a decent team, the land of The Mighty Elephants is in danger of becoming the region where you can find The Mighty White Elephant. I hope I am wrong, for I do like the place, and the stadium is magnificent.