STRIKING IT RICH: On URC derbies, Champions Cup and Sacha and Dewald

It’s derby time and particularly in the Cape that often means a packed to capacity stadium. At the start of this week over 30 000 tickets had already been sold for the Stormers/Sharks Vodacom URC clash and by midweek that had stretched to more than 40 000, and it is almost certain the house full signs will be up before Saturday.

The Stormers sold out their game against the Bulls at the start of the month and their home ground of DHL Stadium was also sold out for both the big derbies against the Bulls and the Sharks last season.

So the message is that derbies do sell, which perhaps is rooted in South Africans appreciating something they understand and have grown up with.

The draw of traditional rivalries was also underlined in Durban before Christmas when the Sharks played the Bulls in front of a full house at Hollywoodbets Kings Park, although that was admittedly also a day when the Sharks hosted their Sharks Fest.

The full houses that have attended Stormers/Bulls derbies in both Cape Town and Pretoria over the past few seasons would have come for the rugby alone and it will be interesting to see if there are any bells and whistles added to next week’s return coastal derby in Durban and what the turnout will be.

My money says it will be another good one for while local fans are still struggling to get their heads around the two competitions their teams compete in, and I have lost count of the number of people who are big rugby watchers who tell me they don’t know the difference between the URC and Investec Champions Cup, the derby rivalries have remained the same.

What I do worry about is the fact that the two Stormers/Sharks games are being played back to back within seven days of each other. While it may create interest to have a mini-series, the intensity and physicality of South African derbies can take a lot out of players and teams.

If the first game in Cape Town on Saturday is anything like as bruising and intense as the recent Stormers/Bulls derby, the two teams are going to be out on their feet by the time they get to Durban.

I thought the Stormers and Bulls had played each other to a standstill by the second half of their game, which was why it was quite a slowed up affair after halftime.

Last year the Sharks lost both Andre Esterhuizen and Aphelele Fassi to relatively long term injuries in the Cape Town derby. Hopefully there won’t be a repeat, but it should be worrying from a player welfare perspective that these teams are set to play 160 minutes against each other in the space of a week.

THE SOLLY CONTROVERSY OF 1999 WOULD NOT HAPPEN NOW

Alan Solomons was the Stormers coach when back in 1999, at the start of their famous ‘Men in Black’ campaign, the visitors invoked the ire of the New Zealand media and rugby public by opting to go under-strength in a Super Rugby game against the Highlanders in Dunedin.

The Stormers had beaten the Hurricanes with a last gasp penalty the week before and were set to finish off their tour against New South Wales Waratahs in Sydney. The Highlanders had a strong team that year and Solomons, who was perhaps well ahead of his time, decided that his team could not play all the games at full strength.

There was one of heck of a hullabaloo as a result of him resting star players like Bob Skinstad - indeed, it was just a few big name players rested, not even the entire team - and there were all sorts of threats of action being taken against the Stormers because going under-strength was not within the spirit of the game and was contrary to a competition agreement.

Solly was an astute and successful lawyer before he went professional as a rugby coach, so he knew how to argue his way out of it, but he wouldn’t have to do that today. Going under-strength has become so commonplace that it is almost an expectation in some competitions.

I feel sorry for those who are working so hard to market the Champions Cup as the greatest club competition on earth, which it should be, when their efforts are undermined by the team selections.

Last week there were some riveting games as the final round of the pool stage determined who went through to the extended knockouts, but there were also far too many strength versus development games.

With many South Africans still remembering how rare it was for an understrength team to be fielded in Super Rugby, it is hard to see how the competition is ever going to really take off like it should in this country while this situation persists.

UNDERSTRENGTH PE GAME WOULD HAVE INDUCED A TIZZY FIT

Back in December it was touch and go whether I should pay for myself to drive from Cape Town to cover the Stormers/La Rochelle Champions Cup game in Gqeberha.

The game was being played in the Eastern Cape city because of a clash with a Moto-cross event at their regular home ground, but Stormers versus La Rochelle provided two riveting games back in 2024 - one of them a pool game won by the Stormers with a late Manie Libbok conversion, another a round of 16 game lost to a missed Libbok conversion into a treacherous wind.

Those were both good games to be at, particularly the round of 16 game, where those present got a proper feel of the emotion that goes into the Champions Cup. The Stormers were gutted when they came so near and yet so far against a team that was then the reigning champion in the competition.

In the end I opted against the long drive on the basis that there was no guarantee it would be a proper Stormers/La Rochelle game because La Rochelle had won the week before and might rest top players. Which is exactly what they did. In fact it was worse than that - the La Rochelle side resembled a youth team, with several 19-year-olds making their Champions Cup debuts.

It may have been a good experience for those youngsters and a useful depth building exercise for La Rochelle coach Ronan O’Gara, but it wasn’t a game that you’d want to drive 800 kilometres to see. I would have had a tizzy fit had I arrived in PE (let’s call it that) only to discover that La Rochelle were chasing a development objective.

And ditto any fans from elsewhere in the UK who might have taken the trouble to go and watch the Stormers play Harlequins at the Twickenham Stoop in the third round. Regardless of which side you supported, the game was undermined by the Stormers going understrength.

And understrength has been an underlying narrative for much of the Stormers’ European campaign - they were under-strength when they beat Bayonne and also when they were in London, it was the opposition who were under-strength in the two home games.

LATE TEAM ANNOUNCEMENT RULE IS A PROBLEM

So imagine you are booking in advance for a concert headlined by the 1980s hit band, The Police. And you were told that the lead singer, Sting, was only going to confirm his participation in the concert the day before the event. Would you book tickets? Probably not.

But that is effectively what the paying spectators are being asked to do in the Champions Cup because of the silly rule that no team announcements can be made until the day before the game. For goodness sake, if Rassie Erasmus can announce his Springbok team for an important test match four of five days ahead of a game, then so can club coaches.

Obviously it will help to sell the game to announce early when teams are fully loaded. The attendance for the Bulls/Bordeaux-Begles game at Loftus in December was really poor. It might have been better had the Pretoria rugby public known that this time Bordeaux were actually sending their fully loaded team, with several France internationals in it.

And the 24 000 crowd that saw the Stormers beat Leicester last week might have been increased a bit had Capetonians known ahead of time that Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu was captaining the team for the first time.

However, it works the other way too - the weekend of the aforementioned Gqeberha game actually saw me facing a choice, as there was also some allure to going to Durban for the Sharks/Saracens game.

The expectation would have been to see a Saracens team with Maro Itoje, Jamie George and Owen Farrell in it, but instead that too was more of a development team.

Again fuel for, if I was a regular paying spectator, a proper tizzy fit. And if I was a regular paying spectator, it would undermine my confidence to plan ahead.

SACHA’S NOMINATION SPEAKS TO THE PROBLEM

The fuss being made over Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu is completely understandable. The Springbok and Stormers flyhalf is a generational player. But sometimes the hype is overdone, with his nomination as one of the 10 contenders for the Investec Player of the Season award being a case in point.

Due to the above-mentioned trend of strength versus development, star players are often used sparingly in the pool phases. And Sacha played just two games of the four, both of them against second string or development teams - La Rochelle and Leicester Tigers.

WHEN I SEE DEWALD I SEE SACHA

The commentators made an interesting point at the Newlands Betway SA 20 game between MI Cape Town and Pretoria Capitals. When Dewald Brevis started hitting sixes to boost the visitors to a formidable total, there was very little noise or appreciation from a crowd that was wowed by everything Brevis did when he was wearing Cape Town colours in previous seasons.

Having attended a few games, it does appear that the emphasis has changed and crowds have become more partisan (well they always were in Gqeberha with the Orange Army but then that’s understandable given that region has no rugby team to support and the team is also loaded with local players).

I was at the first game ever played in the competition four seasons ago between Cape Town and Paarl Royals, and my motivation for being there was seeing Jofra Archer, who was playing for Cape Town, bowling to star players such as his English teammates Josh Buttler and Eoin Morgan.

When Marco Jansen played a match winning innings for Eastern Cape Sunrisers in that first season there was a lot of appreciation from the Cape Town crowd. Entertainment was the thing.

If it happened now it’d probably draw the same silence that the Brevis innings did. I’m from Cape Town but enjoyed Brevis’ innings because he is just such a joy to watch and such a talent.

It was great to see him get a proper bat and coming off with a well played 70 odd not out in the first eliminator in Durban on Wednesday night. He should bat higher up more often so he can get more experience of building an innings rather than just be encouraged to be a six hitter.

When I watch Brevis play, my mind often wanders to Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu. They are both generational talents, just in different sports. And they might also share something in common - they are both almost too gifted, thus requiring extra work on game management.

Brevis thinks he can hit every ball for six probably because he can. Feinberg-Mngomezulu sometimes gives the impression nothing is impossible, that he can run through the entire opposition team, and he is capable of trying anything.

And it gets justified when, as so often happens, it comes off. Sacha has reined himself in at Bok level, sometimes I wonder if he finds that harder to do at a level lower down.

Brevis was a bit infuriating for Proteas fans in some of the recent T20 and ODI games in India for the way he put himself in position to dominate and propel his team to victory and then, usually when his score was around the 30s, try and launch one big shot too many and get out.

Make no mistake though, Brevis is just 22, Sacha is a year older. They are both generational talents and will be remembered as such when their respective careers are over.