STRIKING IT RICH: Popularity of URC derbies and SA20 suggests less is more

ENGLAND COULD HAVE ASHES EXPERIENCE BEFORE JOBURG

It was good to start off the week with an information session with the Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus at SARU House, where predictably a lot of the talk was about Tony Brown, the Greatest Rivalry Series - and England!

Rassie told us that while the four games in four weeks against the All Blacks in August and September will be the big event of the year, his initial focus was on the opening Nations Cup game against England in July.

Wanting to beat England is of course a no-brainer because of their current 10-match winning run. When they beat New Zealand last November, England captain Maro Itoje mentioned his desire to play the world champions as soon as possible. And there was a similar attitude in an English media that does tend to overdo the purple prose even when they beat Canada, so of course a win over the All Blacks sends it to another level.

I had first hand experience of that when I was a guest on The Times podcast in the week in Tokyo building up to the 2019 World Cup final. The UK scribes I was sharing the platform with described the England win over the All Blacks in the semifinal as the best England win ever and appeared to think the World Cup was already won. I was laughed at when I suggested otherwise.

Are England doing it again? Perhaps. Their coach Steve Borthwick has already asked England fans to find ways to get to what he describes as the Grand Slam decider in the last game of the competition.

Yes, Rassie is right when he says there does seem to be something special building. But for much of the Bazball era there was something building in England cricket too and I was one of those duped into believing that England had their best chance since they last won Down Under in 2011 of winning an Ashes series in Australia. They ended up losing 4-1.

There seems to be almost too much confidence, and before England can get to South Africa to prove they are challenging to be the best in the world they have to win the Guinness Six Nations, which includes an away Calcutta Cup match against Scotland at Murrayfield, where they have a poor record, and a home game against Ireland before the away clash with France.

Let’s see what condition they are in before touting the Ellis Park test in July as the clash of the world’s best. Yes, the Boks are the best, their world ranking shows that, but England still have it all to do.

THE EXTRA GAME IN THE USA SHOULD BE PLAYED AT ANOTHER TIME

Rassie agreed that playing four tests in four weeks against the All Blacks is going to be monstrously tough. He admitted if he was organising the series, he wouldn’t schedule four games, and if there were four then there could be another game in South Africa. But he understands the motivation for playing the final game of the Rivalry Series in Baltimore (USA).

I also understand the Baltimore game in this age where money is everything, but not the timing of it. If the series is going to be marketed as the All Blacks coming to South Africa to try to win a series here, then the entire series should be played here. Which was apparently the initial plan, with the initial plan also being to limit the series to three tests.

The fourth game to be played overseas was always known to the organisers as The Money test, for obvious reasons. But it was going to be played separately from the series. Which is how it should have remained.

If the Springboks are 2-1 up when the two teams climb onto their chartered flight after the third game they’ve effectively defended their fortress and avoided being defeated in a home series. That is where it should rest.

Likewise if the All Blacks are 2-1 up, they’ve emulated the achievement of Sean Fitzpatrick’s team, who made history with their first ever series win, 2-1, here in 1996. Having to then play a decider several time zones and another continent away a week later just feels wrong.

Another date could have been found for the money game, perhaps in the buildup to the World Cup like was the case in 2023 when the two teams met at Twickenham.

BROWN A BOK COACH - UNTIL HE’S NOT

The info session gave Rassie an opportunity to formally address the speculation around the intentions of his attack coach Tony Brown in light of the possibility that his good mate and long time coaching partner Jamie Joseph will take over the reins of the All Blacks. As expected, he put across the same line he did that he did in social media - “Tony is going nowhere”.

I will take that at face value, but at the same time warning that perhaps we should wait a bit before being certain about anything. Reading the comments Brown has made overseas it reminds me of a press conference during the 1994 Bok tour of New Zealand. The then Sarfu president Louis Luyt called it to address the speculation over the future of the then Bok coach Ian McIntosh.

The line I remember was “No, we can’t sack Mac now, that would be ridiculous, wrong and inhumane.” All my colleagues rushed off immediately after the press conference to file stories proclaiming “Mac is safe!”

I never thought he was safe because I had paid attention to the semantics. The Boks were on tour. There were still a few games to be played. I approached Luyt separately: “Doc, you said Mac is safe ‘now’, you used that word. Am I correct in saying that you can’t sack him while the tour is on, but you could sack him when we get home?”

Luyt looked at me long and hard and then nodded his head. “You are correct”.

Brown’s public comments, at least those that I have seen, also have that little word ‘now’ hovering over them even if it is not explicit. As in “I haven’t even been approached by the All Blacks” etc. So what happens if or when they do approach him, if Joseph actually does get the job, and he does make an offer to Brown to join him? How hard is it going to be for Brown to resist then, or put another way, how easy will it be to coach against Joseph?

Joseph is the front runner for the New Zealand job but they’ve also advertised for the position. It would be suicide for Brown to publicly say now he wanted to go with Joseph as Joseph is not yet All Blacks coach. So let’s wait a bit and maybe hold the speculation off until there are real developments in New Zealand around the replacement for Razor Robertson.

WHY I WAS GLAD THE SUNRISERS WON

There were two major events in Cape Town last weekend, the Vodacom URC derby between the DHL Stormers and the Hollywoodbets Sharks on the Saturday and the BetwaySA20 final the next day between Sunrisers Eastern Cape and the Pretoria Capitals. Just to illustrate how sports orientated this city is, both were sold out.

As it turned out, the cricket game was closer than the rugby game, with the two teams conspiring to produce the most closely fought SA20 final yet. Personally it could not have gone more perfectly. I’ve long been hoping for Dewald Brevis to bat higher up the order so he can get a grounding in building experience of building an innings.

The Pretoria Capitals did that in the last few games, with Brevis coming to the wicket in the second over of the final - and responding by scoring a century. Then when Sunrisers batted everything revolved around two Grey High old boys, skipper Tristan Stubbs and Matthew Breetzke.

I didn’t attend that school but I enjoyed that context because what I have always liked about the Sunrisers was the way they appeared to make a special effort to make it an Eastern Cape team. Which they largely managed to do, and it may be why their supporters, The Orange Army, seem so particularly passionate. There were many of them at Newlands on Sunday supporting their team, and the connection works.

And the competition works, as evidenced by how often games were sold out in this year’s edition. I know because I missed out on tickets on a few occasions.

LESS IS MORE

The Sunrisers policy works, and judging from the games I couldn’t get tickets for because they were sold out, the competition works too. Certainly those games I was at were great occasions with viby atmosphere, as indeed there was for the international game between the Proteas and the West Indies I attended in Paarl on Tuesday night.

To me both the rugby on Saturday and the cricket on Sunday was vindication of my theory that more cognisance should be taken in our sports scheduling of the concept of less is more. There was a time when there were too many rugby ‘derbies’, and I put the quotation marks there because a Stormers/Sharks game is only a derby in an international competition.

I used the past tense there intentionally - whether you call them derbies or not, the games between those teams are no longer on the same level of importance in the Currie Cup season just because the domestic competition has ceased to be the event it was.

Back in 2012 Western Cape fans were fully engaged in no less than six meetings between their team and the Sharks - two league games in Super Rugby and then a home semifinal, which the Stormers lost, followed by two big Currie Cup league games and then the teams met again in the final, with this time WP winning.

Now there’s only interest in one visit by the Sharks, and it is the one in the URC, and it may explain why DHL Stadium was sold out for both this most recent derby and the one against the Bulls three weeks prior to that.

The Betway20 wouldn’t pull in so many full houses if it wasn’t all concentrated into one month. Imagine if the competition was as long and as spread out as the URC, which starts in September and finishes the following June. Would there be the same vibe at the games then?

PERCEPTION DRIVES EXPECTATION

Someone asked me why I was making such a fuss about the importance of Saturday’s visit to the Shark Tank for the Stormers. And it was a valid question - I had written that the game was massive for the Stormers but in reality a defeat, with a chance to adjust during the four week break that comes after this, wouldn’t destroy their season.

They’d be two defeats in 10 matches, still in the top three with a game in hand on those around them, a position they would have settled for at the start of the season. The Stormers do have enough credit in the bank to afford a blip now, and are more in the position Arsenal are in the English Premier League than Liverpool are.

Arsenal wouldn’t have liked losing to Manchester United the other day, but they are still top of the league. Liverpool thought they were coming right after a good Champions League win in Marseille the previous week and hadn’t been beaten in 13 games but then came a loss in Bournemouth and suddenly the critics were again unsheathing their knives.

Perception directs expectation and I will stick with the soccer league analogy to illustrate my point. Before Liverpool lost to Bournemouth they were fourth on the league table, but no Liverpool supporter was happy because last year they won the competition therefore there is more expectation.

Man U supporters by contrast are celebrating the fourth place they have now risen to because of good wins over Arsenal and Manchester City. There isn’t a lot separating the Stormers and Sharks teams, but it was No 1 against No 14 last weekend, and the Stormers were at home. The expectation around the Stormers, and therefore the level of disappointment when they lost, comes with the territory.

GAME PLAN SCRUTINY ADDS GRAVITAS TO BOTH DERBIES

But the importance of the Durban game isn’t just around momentum, it is also about the scrutiny currently being placed on their game-plan, which important is less about momentum but because of the scrutiny that is rightly developing around their game-plan, a scrutiny not dissimilar to that on the Bulls when they play the Lions at Ellis Park in the earlier game on Saturday.

The Bulls won two overseas games in a row when they were forced to go pragmatic in the conditions, but are now playing on a surface that will suit the wide ranging attacking rugby that Johan Ackermann used to coach at the Lions and looked like he was trying to implement at the Bulls when they lost in high scoring games at home to the Lions, Bordeaux and Bristol Bears.

It is because we need to see if the Bulls will inject the same balance to their game in highveld conditions that they do in northern hemisphere games that the jury is still out on the Bulls.

The Stormers, having become frenetic and forced in their home games in what looks like a quest to wow their own fans with their “attacking DNA”, have deviated from what worked for them when they won five successive games overseas.

The humidity in Durban is likely to make it a wet weather game so it is going to be interesting from a game strategy viewpoint what the Stormers will do and what result they will get. It adds to the intrigue of what should be an absorbing local double header.