No easy answer to Super 14 riddle

They were calling it The Longest Day and in many ways it was apt that the process of sifting through the arguments and counter-arguments of the various Super 14 bidders should be likened to the epic war movie of the same name.

Afterwards, after many hours of listening to the various franchises tell us how they were going to help the Springboks by transforming the game and how they were going to make more money than Rockerfella Rich, I felt a bit like the Robert Mitchum character in the movie, which dramatized the Allied landings on D-Day.

Of all the last scenes in a war movie, this was the one that best summed up the futility of war. Mitchum, playing an older officer, is lying wounded with a younger soldier somewhere beyond the beaches of Normandy towards the end of that historic day.

The two characters swop stories and experiences for a while. Then the Mitchum character comments: “It has been quite a day hasn’t it?” before nodding to himself and then following up with: “Yes it has. I wonder who won.”

The happenings in the Western Province boardroom were not quite as dramatic or bloody as those on the beaches of Normandy over 60 years ago, but the combatants would all have ended the day wondering whether they had been part of a rewarding, noble effort to liberate the game in their region or whether it was just an exercise in futility.

It is my hunch that none of the two major protagonists, the Eastern Cape and the Central Cheetahs, are going to get what they want in its pure form. That there are going to be dissatisfied customers at the end of the process is because it is a complicated situation which might require administrators to step out of their provincialistic mindsets if a proper resolution is to be reached.

For the big difference between the film of the Normandy invasion and the Rugby Boardroom Epic was that in the latter it was much more difficult to distinguish who the goodies and the baddies were.

Both the Eastern Cape and the Central Cheetahs provided compelling arguments. Both of their presentations were well received by the audience and by the committee.

As you would expect, the Eastern Cape line had a strong transformation emphasis. The stress was on growth of the game into areas where there is maximum growth potential, and on this basis, it was really hard to pick holes in their argument.

For those who don’t know, the Eastern Cape is the one area in this country where rugby has historically been the preferred sport of black Africans (this was the term settled on by the adjudication committee, so I will use it too).

So far this area has been the major nursery for black talent in rugby, and as the Eastern Cape delegation reminded us, it really would be a fallacious argument to suggest the Cheetahs should get the Super 14 franchise on the basis that Bloemfontein has in Grey College the most successful rugby school in terms of producing Springboks.

The Eastern Cape has many great schools with strong rugby traditions. Let’s start off with one of the least known of them, Graeme College in Grahamstown, which produced Hennie le Roux, before proceeding up through Muir College (the prodigiously talented Du Plessis brothers) and then through such well known rugby hatcheries as Kingswood College, St Andrews College, Queens College, Dales College, Framesby and Selborne before ending at Grey High in Port Elizabeth.

It was somewhat ironic that one of the main Cheetahs delegates, Rassie Erasmus, was in fact initially a product of the Despatch rugby factory. These schools are now not just producing very good white rugby players, which they still do, but are sending through black talent with conveyer-belt regularity.

Everyone tells me that if you go to Dale or Queens on Founders Weekend to watch the big match you will be shocked, but also extremely heartened, by the multi-racial nature of both the teams on the field and the crowd watching the action.

These are compelling arguments for giving the Eastern Cape a piece of the Super 14 pie. It is just too large an area, and too great a potential growth opportunity for rugby, for it to be ignored.

But then Erasmus, the former Cheetahs captain and capped 39 times for the Springboks, did also make a good point when he suggested that had he not left the Eastern Cape and gone to Bloemfontein, he may never have become the rugby player he was.

There is no denying that when it comes to producing talent, the rugby people of Bloemfontein have the Midas touch. Year after year the other provinces plunder that region for rugby talent (as indeed they do the Eastern Cape at age-group level), and year after year the Cheetahs somehow remain competitive.

As Erasmus says, there is no sound rugby argument why the Lions, who lose to the Cheetahs more often than they win, should have been the host union of the Cats. But of course money does talk, and the Cats have Ellis Park and Johannesburg, just as the Sharks, who produce maggots in terms of home grown talent, will somehow survive through their current bumbling on the basis that they have a really impressive stadium and own the best rugby party in the world.

The difference between the Cheetahs presentation and the Eastern Cape one was predictable – the Cheetahs had facts at their finger-tips, hard evidence to support their claims, while the Eastern Cape might be accused by their critics of not having enough meat on the bones of their argument.

There again, former Springbok Garth Wright, as part of the Eastern Cape delegation, was also correct when he pointed out that Perth was not chosen to be the fourth Australian franchise on the basis that it was a particularly big or rich city or that it had good rugby players.

It was chosen because, with nearly 100 000 South Africans in it, it was the area where rugby was most likely to grow (as opposed to Melbourne, where there are too many rival codes and not enough of a rugby culture for it to really take hold).

Those who argue against the Eastern Cape because there are no players from that region currently in the top flight of players in South Africa should also think again. Many of the top players have the Eastern Cape in their roots (like Mark Andrews, Os du Randt and Hennie le Roux all did), and it should not be forgotten that when the highly successful ACT Brumbies franchise first came into being there were precious few people in the squad who hailed from the Australian Capital Territories.

But then the Brumbies in those days, and Perth now, were not up against an established rugby factory like Bloemfontein in the battle for a place in the Super competition.

It is all very complicated, and frankly I don’t see how either of the two claims can really be ignored. That is why some kind of compromise might be the best way forward, and I know it is being suggested by people in high places.

There was a lot of criticism last year in this column for the new Currie Cup format. But the suggestion from the adjudication committee that bigger, richer unions help out the smaller ones in a bigger way through loaning personnel and a more equitable spread of finances could hold the key to unlocking the problems addressed by the various delegations.

It is not easy though, and might explain to some extent why South Africa are still trying to find their fifth Super 14 team while the fourth Australian side is already busy recruiting players. It might also explain why this piece of writing has developed into The Longest Column…