TALKING POINT: As rivalries develop so will SA interest

There were only 7 000 people at Loftus at the weekend to see the Vodacom Bulls advance to an Investec Champions Cup quarterfinal for the first time and although there were 20 000 more than that at DHL Stadium later in the afternoon, there should arguably have been a lot more than that.

DHL Stormers coach John Dobson summed up what I had been thinking when after his team’s narrow loss to La Rochelle in their round of 16 game, a clash which let it be said was played in an electric atmosphere, he compared the Stormers’ recent Vodacom URC match against Edinburgh with the one that his team had just played.

“There were 24 000 at the Edinburgh game two weeks ago and there were 27 000 here today. You would have thought there’d be much more of a difference in the two crowds given the standing of this game (which was a knock-out fixture against the European champions),” said Dobson.

The Stormers chief honcho clearly doesn’t believe the Champions Cup, and the standing of that competition as rugby’s equivalent to soccer’s Champions League, has caught on with South Africans as yet. He explained it by saying that the URC took a while to get into the minds of local fans too, and that maybe the problem is that the Champions Cup is a season behind the URC in this country.

“I don’t think we would have got more than 10 000, certainly nothing like 24 000, for an Edinburgh game in our first season,” said Dobson.

The Stormers played Edinburgh away in that first season, and it was also a Covid impacted period where crowds were limited by government decree, but what he says is probably accurate. As he is in making the comparison. Edinburgh were ahead of the Stormers on the URC log when they visited Cape Town, but they are not considered a top team in either that competition or in Europe. Certainly not close to the standing of a La Rochelle or a Leinster.

STILL CONFUSION ON HOW IT ALL FITS TOGETHER

Dobson is also probably right when he says many South Africans are confused by there being two different international competitions being played at the same time. Someone who works in sport who’d I’d have assumed would understand it asked me the following question straight after the game: “So does this mean the Stormers are now out of the competition? What happens to them now?”

The answer is they are out of it but that their exit will probably help their challenge for a top four spot in the bread and butter competition, the one that enables them to play in the Champions Cup, meaning the URC. As I wrote in my wrap on Monday, losing so narrowly against such a good team was probably the best result for the Stormers as it means they don’t have to take a half crocked team to Dublin to play mighty Leinster in a game they would almost certainly lose.

Instead they now have two weeks, and no travel obstacles in those two weeks, before they face the Ospreys and then Leinster in two crucial home URC games. The travel obstacle has been extensively highlighted in the past few days by Jake White, the coach of the only South African team to have made this year’s quarterfinal round.

As we know now, the SA Rugby travel department jumped in at the 11th hour to ease the way for the Bulls as they head to Northampton for Saturday’s game. At a cost of over R4-million, most of the Bulls players and coaches flew on direct overnight flights to the UK. It avoided a situation where they were going to fly on eight separate flights via the Middle East and really compromise their buildup to Saturday’s Franklins Gardens game.

FRONTING TRAVEL CHALLENGE DOESN’T HELP

Had Manie Libbok succeeded with his winning conversion and the Stormers got through, SA Rugby would probably not have been able to splash out for overnight flights for both squads.

White has not named his squad, but it is understood that the travel obstacles, and the fact that the return flights would only get the players back to South Africa three days before an important home URC clash with that competition's reigning champion team, Munster, necessitated him sending a slightly under-strength squad.

He had to do that last year in the Pool phase, and of course none of this really helps the Champions Cup catch on with South African fans either. It is a fact though, that with teams with playing budgets three times as big as the Bulls and the Stormers, that winning the URC is right now a more realistic goal than winning the elite European competition.

Unless the Sharks, who have the financial muscle to contract a Galactico squad, find a way into the Champions Cup next season, a South African team winning the competition may still be at least two or three seasons away. Those were actually Dobson’s words (he just never mentioned the Sharks), and not mine, but I agree with him.

Apart from anything else, as it stands the South African teams have to travel for the semifinal round if they get there, as all games in that stage are set for Europe. And the Bulls will be facing one of Leinster or La Rochelle, both big budget teams, if they get that far. As players develop though and their experience of the competition is expanded, the South Africa sides will start to compete better.

‘DEVELOP’ IS THE KEY WORD

The word ‘develop’ is the key word too when it comes to the Champions Cup catching on in this country. What needs to be developed is the emotional attachment or investment that comes about through a history in the competition starting to develop.

The Stormers had for a while been building towards the first Champions Cup knock-out game, as they had been by the way for the Pool game against La Rochelle in December, where they knew they were up against a mighty team (yet only 11 000 pitched for that game). So they were understandably sore to lose by such a small margin, particularly as they had it in their grasp before they were hit by a swathe of injuries and they lost discipline in the second half.

But what we didn’t see from the spectators was the emotion shown by the Munster fans who flocked to Aviva in 2022 for a Champions Cup playoff game against the other mighty French team, Toulouse, and saw their team lose to a penalty shoot-out that followed a stalemate after normal and then extra-time.

What I recall about that game was the tears in the eyes of not only the Munster players, but also so many of their fans. That is how much the Champions Cup means to them, and that attachment comes from the history that they and their teams have developed in the competition.

TOOK TIME FOR SUPER RUGBY RIVALRIES TO GROW

At the start of the Super Rugby era the familiarity with the teams was helped by the Super 10 that South African teams were part of towards the end of the amateur era, but it still took a long time for the intense rivalry that took hold between say the Sharks and Auckland (Blues), who played in the first Super 12 final in 1996, and later the Stormers and Crusaders when the Christchurch team came to Cape Town, to develop.

With time the rugby public started to understand who the strong teams were, and there were games that inflamed the rivalry. In the URC, the Stormers/Ulster games have become massive because of what happened two years ago when the Stormers won two incredibly close games, one of them a semifinal. That rivalry was clear to see when the two sides played each other to almost a standstill the week before last.

The two La Rochelle games played in Cape Town will have helped a big rivalry develop between the French team and the Stormers too. Both for the squads and the fans, with La Rochelle supporters probably remembering the agony of their loss to a late Libbok conversion in December as much as the Cape fans will now have this past weekend in their memory banks.

Things were said off the field and from the dugout in both games that will also have developed that rivalry and the face-off between Dobson and La Rochelle coach Ronan O’Gara doesn’t quite yet touch that between Dobson and White but it is already getting there.

Just as the epic early encounters between Kiwi and South African teams, and the local teams and some of the Australian teams, developed an emotional link for the local rugby public, so will the Champions Cup. It will just take a bit of time, and some more absorbing and spirited games like the one we saw in Cape Town this past weekend.