RC Toulon's Charles Ollivon is chased by DHL Stormers' Warrick Gelant at the Stade Mayol, Toulon, France.
Image: ©INPHO/Federico Pestellini
South Africa’s inability to go deep into the Champions Cup once again is getting embarrassing after an unfortunate weekend of Round of 16 action saw the Bulls and Stormers crash out.
To be fair to both of those teams, they got stuck in, and the Stormers, in particular, were robbed of victory by “dreadful refereeing decisions,” as former Springbok coach Nick Mallett unambiguously put it.
The weekend started badly when the Sharks’ Challenge Cup campaign ended with less of a bang and more of a whimper. The Durbanites had a strong first half against Connacht but badly fell off the pace in the second.
The Sharks are struggling with injuries, but for a proud club, not to even make the quarter-finals of a second-tier competition is disappointing.
It is worse for the Lions — they fell out of the Challenge Cup bus long ago.
The issue is that the rugby world north of the equator has been scrutinising South Africa’s participation in the Champions Cup since they got on board in the 2022/23 season, and they don’t like what they see.
A South African team has never made the semi-finals. This year, they couldn’t make the quarterfinals, and the critics who have questioned whether South Africa deserves to be in arguably the best rugby competition in the world will again raise their voices.
It is the French in particular who don’t like the African presence in what they see as a proudly European competition, which has a rich history.
The French can’t stand the long journey to South Africa for matches because travel in the Champions Cup (previously the Heineken Cup) was always about short trips across the English Channel, at the most.
The Bulls, Stormers, Sharks, and Lions at various points have all been guilty of sending second-string sides to Cup matches and thus have been accused of showing disrespect.
Why would the SA teams do this? The answer is that they can’t be all things to all people when they are the only rugby country in the world where the top players play all year, with no off-season. South Africa is the only country that participates in both hemispheres — The Springboks are in the Rugby Championship in the south, and the top club teams are in the United Rugby Championship in the north.
As John Plumtree famously put it at a press conference in Cape Town, “The players are not robots”.
Players have to be rotated; they can’t play every match. Professional rugby is not just physically debilitating but mentally exhausting. The repeated long-distance travel over the course of a year takes a toll on the body and mind.
Where the SA teams have to get better is in their recruitment, so that when top players have to take a break, the players stepping in are not markedly inferior. This was a big issue at the Sharks — they would be almost unbeatable when they had their dozen or so Springboks and then would fall apart when those players left for international duty.
The way South Africa’s participation in Europe has worked out, the focus has been far more on the United Rugby Championship. After the Toulon game at the weekend, John Dobson referred to the URC as “our day job”.
This is clear in the composition of the URC log, where, out of 16 teams, the Stormers are second, the Lions fifth, the Bulls seventh, and the Sharks tenth.
And having flopped in the European Cup competitions, there is a big responsibility for South Africa to dominate the URC playoffs. There can be no excuses. The four teams know exactly where they stand with four rounds to go and have no Cup competitions to distract them.
Nothing less than all four SA teams in the quarter-finals in June will do.
The remaining URC fixtures for the South African teams are:
STORMERS
LIONS
BULLS
SHARKS