Two World Cup wins in a row. Some of the brightest coaching minds in the world orchestrated by the ‘Dark Lord’ Rassie Erasmus, with a long-term prospect of the Springboks joining the Six Nations. A pain-free transition from Super Rugby in the south to the United Rugby Championship in the north, with an immediate all-South African final between the Bulls and Stormers in 2021-22.
It all seemed to be going so swimmingly for South African rugby, but finally the juggernaut has hit a bump in the road. It is not so much a pothole as a large sinkhole. In the opening two rounds of the Investec Champions Cup, sides from the Republic have won only one of their first six games, and the negatives of South African participation are beginning to loom larger than the positives.
George Hammond with offload of the weekend for @Harlequins? 🤯
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— Investec Champions Cup (@ChampionsCup) December 15, 2024
Two of the second-round routs [the Sharks’ 56-17 loss to Leicester and the Stormers’ 53-16 defeat at the Stoop] highlighted the problems of travelling to and from South Africa for one-off games. Both franchises were forced to field weaker teams, and the back-to-back format – one game in South Africa, the next in Europe seven days later – meant the Sharks were missing the beefy Bokke rump of their starting line-up: Ox Nché, Vincent Koch, Bongi Mbonambi, Eben Etzebeth, Siya Kolisi, Grant Williams, André Esterhuizen, Aphelele Fassi and Makazole Mapimpi. The Stormers are battling a savage injury list and through fitness or selection were without Frans Malherbe, Steven Kitshoff, Ben-Jason Dixon, Ruben van Heerden, Evan Roos, Manie Libbok and Damian Willemse.
Before descending a slippery negative slope too quickly, let’s tip our hat to the upside of South African participation in the two premier tournaments in Europe. Stormers head coach John Dobson was surprisingly upbeat and crystal clear the future of the rugby Republic lies north of the equator.
“As South Africans, we have to be better,” he said. “We are not disrespecting [the tournament], but we need to get ourselves into a better position. I don’t know how we solve it. It’s like being invited to someone’s birthday party, then complaining about the chips. We are so grateful to be here.
“We have to be part of this tournament because it’s such a high level and it’s such a great tournament.
“And if we’re not careful, were we not to be part of the Champions Cup, and the URC morphed into an Anglo[-Celtic] League and we went back to the Currie Cup of the 1980s where we were playing Griqualand West and Free State in dusty Kimberley, that would be disastrous for South African rugby.
“This competition is probably what has helped us so much in World Cups. Every breakdown is a competition. Every scrum is a 20-second contest. Every lineout or maul is a contest.
“That has been a massive boost for South African rugby, and we’ve got to make sure we can stay here, but evenings like this evening don’t help.”
One of the most recent high-profile international retirees who is only just starting to build his media profile, Welshman Dan Biggar, observed the advantages of South African participation from the reverse angle in his column for The Daily Mail.
“I can understand entirely why everyone wants a piece of South African rugby,” he wrote. “They’re the double world champions. They’ve got so many world-class players and they bring significant television revenue into the northern hemisphere competitions. They have added hugely to the URC.”
Flip the coin: whether it lands heads or tails, the presence of South African teams in European competition is a win-win, an essential litmus test for the rugby progress made on both sides.
The problems are practical and logistical in nature. In the URC, the travel issues are resolved by mini-tours – playing multiple away fixtures in two or three-game blocks. That allows squads to be rotated and players to acclimatise fully to different time zones and an alien set of playing conditions. The Stormers supremo and the ex-Wales and Lions 10 would like to see the same practice adopted in the Champions Cup.
“If the South African teams are going to stay in the Champions Cup, I would restructure the tournament so teams travel there for two-week blocks like in the URC. We want the Champions Cup to be the best it can be and at the moment, teams aren’t being given the chance to play at their peak.” [Biggar]
“I see in January we play Leinster in the URC and then Racing [92 in Paris in the EPCR]. Is there a way to link them up on a tour? That would make it much more palatable. We could take our strongest team and play both games at full bore.” [Dobson]
An alternative option would be to play the qualifiers as four conferences based around the Premiership [four qualifiers], Top 14 [six], a European URC [four] and a South African URC [two]. The knockouts could then be played out on a two-leg basis, home and away, with breaks between each of the four play-off rounds.
A disturbing slurry draining away from the main debate is the more ancient feeling of underlying enmity between north and south. After the last round of matches, ex-England and Lions hooker Brian Moore concluded, in a Daily Telegraph piece entitled ‘Change European rugby to help South African teams? No thanks’: “the European tournaments already involved clubs from six nations before the entry of the South African teams via the URC. You must wonder how much it adds to the tournaments to include another country, particularly when this imposes extra burdens.”
The context of such comments is as much political as it is practical or logistical in origin, and they highlight just how persuasive a case South African rugby needs to mount – not only stay in Europe, but eventually, to extend its involvement at international level via the Six Nations. A team from South Africa simply must reach the pointy end of the tournament in the near future to keep Biggar’s perspective alive; before the Republic finds itself in a dangerous rugby no-man’s-land with the sky darkening overhead, and political shells exploding all around.
The most disheartening result from a South African point of view in the second round of matches was the Bulls’ loss to English champions Northampton at Loftus Versveld. Jake White fielded a strong run-on XV, but Saints still won the game while accruing a four-try bonus point in the process. The key to Saints’ success was the return of Alex Mitchell at nine, and his performance was influential enough to make you wonder what England might have achieved had he been available in November.
Mitchell’s kicking game is so long and accurate, and his instincts around the base so finely tuned, it is not at all hard to see him installed as the Lions’ first-choice scrum-half. The Saints retained three of their half-back’s five high contestable kicks, and the sheer length of his exits turned formidable in the thin air of Pretoria.
When you can ally length to the vision, and spot a 50-22 turnover kick deep inside the opposition 22, you are on to a winner at high altitude stadiums such as Loftus.
It is perhaps Mitchell’s flexibility at the base of the ruck which is his single biggest point of difference for club and country.
In both instances, ‘Mitch’ arrives square at the ruck, able to run or pass to either side, then he gives the first three defenders around the ruck ‘the eyes’ – those killer eyes. In the first clip, he initially looks back to the short side and that stops the three Bulls forwards in the area in their tracks. There is no wrap around to the far side of the ruck, and that is where the attack is really headed. In the second clip he does the opposite, looking left to drag the forwards across to the far side before passing back in the other direction.
It is Mitchell’s running threat around the fringes which ultimately has the defending forwards shuttling back and forth like puppets on the scrum-half’s string.
After taking the quick tapped penalty, Mitchell sees Bulls prop Wilco Louw still dropping back into position after the previous ruck and that makes him a ripe target for the run and offload to Juarno Augustus.
After his Sharks side suffered a 50-point defeat at the weekend, head coach John Plumtree was blunt in his assessment of the current format of European competition: “We are all competitive. But the reality is we have got to look after these athletes. They are not robots.” It is probably the first big setback South Africa has experienced as a rugby nation since Erasmus took over as national coach in 2018, and it has occurred at club/provincial level.
There is one query about how the travel needs to and from South Africa can be accommodated in an improved format; there is another, much bigger question mark around whether some of the more conservative ‘diehards’ really want a South African presence in Europe at all. There is a logistical problem and a political axe to grind, and the Republic needs to be careful it does not fall between the stools in two hemispheres, leaving it nowhere to go.
