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CHAMPIONS CUP WRAP: Bulls the big concern in lamentably poor weekend for SA

rugby12 January 2026 06:39
By:Gavin Rich
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There’s no way to sugar-coat what was a lamentably poor weekend for South African teams in the Investec Championship Cup, with the third-round games exposing some of the promise shown in the matches as played in December as a false dawn.

Some perspective obviously needs to be applied to the two games played overseas. Just why the Hollywoodbets Sharks felt they needed to go understrength to Sale Sharks, a team that is pretty ordinary and, on Saturday’s evidence, could have been easy meat for a full-strength Sharks team, only they will know. Clermont-Auvergne are likely to be at half-strength for the game in Durban this coming weekend, and there was a seven-day turnaround.

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However, it is a fact that the Sharks played against Sale with a second-string team, and the DHL Stormers were also significantly under-strength during their visit to London, which was understandable given the six-day turnaround before they play Leicester Tigers in Cape Town.

STORMERS' CHANCES WEAKENED WHEN WE SAW THEIR SQUAD

With no squad announcement when the Stormers flew out, we didn’t know who was on the plane and who wasn’t, but when the 23-man squad was announced on Friday, it immediately became apparent that the hopes of a Stormers win against a full-strength Harlequins might have been fanciful.

There were four debutants in the squad, and most importantly, there wasn’t the powerful bomb squad type bench that has enabled the Stormers to engineer a gear shift in other games.

So ultimately, the Stormers probably got no more out of the game than they should have expected given the team that was assembled. As their director of rugby, John Dobson, pointed out afterwards, if the Stormers had lost 9-0, they would have felt happier about themselves, but they’d still not have anything to show in terms of log points.

As he would probably acknowledge himself, however, it was the manner in which his team surrendered what up to that point had been a 10-match unbeaten record that was most disturbing. Maybe it was the inexperience in the team, but the Stormers lacked composure once they fell behind early, and while their scrum was dominant throughout the game and the lineout also functioned well for the most part, their attack was discordant and the defence was just completely inept.

It looked like one of those days when the team just doesn’t pitch, and at times in the first half it looked like it was Harlequins against Ben-Jason Dixon, although Ruben van Heerden, Marcel Theunissen and, after he came back from the HIA that had him off the field when much of the early damage was being done, Damian Willemse also played their hearts out.

But it is a fact that the Stormers were away and under-strength, with even some of the reserves being rested for this coming Saturday’s home game, and at the end of the day, they are still on track for a home round-of-16 game.

The bonus point they were chasing in London was just to make sure, rather than having to rely on other teams helping them out and needing to chase a four-try bonus in the final pool game against the Tigers.

BULLS ARE IN SERIOUS TROUBLE

The damage to the Stormers may be the massive dent they sustained to the perception that they’ve improved their depth, and after all, this was one loss in 11, so hardly a cause for panic, but for the Vodacom Bulls, who lost at full strength at home to Bristol Bears, it’s quite different. Up to the Loftus game, it was possible to think that talk of a crisis in Pretoria was an overreaction, but not anymore.

The Bulls game was seen as the banker this weekend. They were at home, they had their Boks in tow, and most pundits agreed with the bookies, who gave the Bulls quite a telling advantage according to their points spread. It was anything but, and no one should be fooled by the 12-point margin at the end - the Bulls were outplayed and Bristol bossed the scoreboard from the opening minutes.

The defensive effort was inept - there’s that same word used to describe the Stormers - and canels out the talk of an improvement following the low-scoring derby against the Stormers the week before. While it would be easy to blame the defence coach, with two assistants having already been shown the door this season, the same defence coach worked under Jake White when he took the Bulls to a second-place finish in the Vodacom URC and to a final.

The spectre of White is looming large over Loftus right now, and rightly so, for the weakness of the Bulls administration in allowing player power to drive a change to something that was working - three finals in four years made the Bulls the most consistent URC team in the White era - was always a bit of a red flag to this scribe when the changes were made in the off-season.

It is apparently debatable that the dissatisfaction with White within the Bulls group was as widespread as it was made out to be, but if he had lost the change-room as is alleged, at least he was achieving the results that should be seen as the Bulls’ bottom line.

Of course, the Bulls have the players to get things right, and the quite unusual step was made a fortnight ago of announcing that four Bok assistant coaches will be helping out going forward, but you have to ask whether this blip from the Bulls was necessary given where they were under the coaching of White.

ENGLAND 148 SOUTH AFRICA 69

The Bulls’ defeat at home was the most disturbing aspect of a weekend that saw English Premiership teams score 148 points compared to 69 against South African opponents, who frankly were lucky to get as much as 69 as Bristol dropped a gear when they had the game won.

That synopsis just isn’t good enough at this time, when there is a desperate need to sell the Champions Cup to a market that is taking a while to adjust to having their teams playing in two separate competitions and which may still lack understanding of the difference between the two competitions.

In that sense, the Stormers’ big loss is a blow to the brand, whether they like it or not, and it also isn’t a great advert of the strength of rugby in the world champion nation to the overseas viewers. It is probably incumbent on the Stormers now to fly the SA flag into the knock-out stages of the competition, and if they do go deep, all is not lost in the quest to improve the local standing.

But they have to beat Leicester Tigers first and after watching Bristol make such a mockery of the Bulls’ status as “the banker” among the SA teams, as my supersport.com preview put it, all bets are now off.

As it turned out, the only EPCR win recorded by a South African team this weekend was in the secondary Challenge Cup, with the Lions winning against Lyon in Johannesburg. The miserable weekend from an SA viewpoint was rounded off by the Toyota Cheetahs’ home game in Amsterdam against Ulster being first postponed due to the state of the pitch following the visit of Storm Goretti and then later awarded as a forfeit to Ulster.

Weekend Investec Champions Cup results (third round)

Edinburgh 26 Gloucester 24

Castres 20 Bath 43

Vodacom Bulls 49 Bristol Bears 61

Clermont-Auvergne 21 Glasgow Warriors 33

Leinster 25 La Rochelle 24

Sale 26 Hollywoodbets Sharks 10

Leicester Tigers 57 Bayonne 14

Scarlets 38 Pau 47

Toulon 27 Munster 25

Harlequins 61 DHL Stormers 10

Bordeaux-Begles 50 Northampton Saints 28

Saracens 20 Toulouse 14

EPCR Challenge Cup

Lions 42 Lyon 33

Toyota Cheetahs v Ulster (Abandoned because of inclement weather and pitch)

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