TALKING POINT: To join the elite SA teams must protect their frontier better

After the Emirates Lions lost 42-0 to Glasgow Warriors this past weekend their coach Ivan van Rooyen spoke about the wind.

When the Vodacom Bulls lost their opening Investec Champions Cup game in December, their director of rugby Jake White spoke as if they had lost to Storm Darragh, and not to Saracens.

In White’s defence, sometimes you have to be there experiencing it yourself to really understand the full impact of the weather conditions. Maybe the wind blowing behind the Glasgow backs in the first half of their most recent Vodacom United Rugby Championship match was enough to explain the Lions conceding six first half tries.

It’s not just White and Van Rooyen, it is a trend for South African coaches to reference weather conditions as an obstacle when they are overseas.

And we people in the media are just as preoccupied with the weather as the coaches are: “What’s the weather like there now?”, “What’s the weather forecast for game time?”, “Have you got the feel of the 4G pitch yet and how much of a challenge is that going to be?”

DHL Stormers coach John Dobson spoke about the lottery of the “swirling wind” before his team played at Kingspan Stadium in Belfast last Friday night, and it made it into my match report for supersport.com, in the sense that the first Ulster try was pretty much created by the field position the hosts got from the kick that blew over Damian Willemse’s head and forced a poor exit.

OVERSEAS TEAMS JUST GET JOB DONE

While there are weather, climatic and geographic curve balls thrown at teams that cross the equator to South Africa, it does appear that the visiting teams make less of a fuss of it than our lot do. Or are starting to make less of an issue of it.

Which might explain why the northern hemisphere teams are becoming much more competitive when they come here now than they did in the first two seasons.

They should certainly have as much reason to be focused on the differences between playing in their home countries and playing in South Africa as the South Africans are.

What overseas players who have come out from the dark and cold of a northern winter experience when they run out at Ellis Park or Loftus at 2pm on an African summer afternoon at altitude is unimaginable.

Ditto teams that find themselves in Durban at a similar time of day in December or January. The humidity at that time of year is close to unbearable for people who live there, so imagine what it is like for visiting teams.

Toulouse were in Durban this past January and it cues a point - they came here and they won. Okay, so they aren’t the best example to use to further the point I am working towards making because they are a Galactico team.

And they would arguably have left Durban feeling they could have won by more had the conditions been different. That was a close game compared to most that Toulouse have played in this season.

SAINTS SHOULDN’T GO TO PRETORIA AND WIN

Northampton Saints though shouldn’t have been expected to come to Pretoria and win. But they did. And Glasgow Warriors and Munster both did it last year. Glasgow are worthy of extra focus, for they were blown away by the Lions a few weeks before they came back here to win last year’s URC final.

There was either some correction made in a short space of time, or a more thought out plan hadn’t quite hit target on the first visit, where they also lost to the Bulls in league play.

Possibly the latter, because Glasgow coach Franco Smith told the media after the URC final that he’d applied what he’d learned from studying the altitude training of elite athletes, and that surely isn’t something you can apply and perfect in the space of a few short weeks.

What’s important to note is that when the Saints won in Pretoria in the Champions Cup, their coach acknowledged that he had taken advice from Smith. The bottom line is that there’s no longer as much of a mystique about altitude as there was for visiting teams.

And in the past fortnight a mixture of Leinster’s second string, fringe and academy players showed that the aura there may have been about playing in South Africa is being eroded too.

So if you want to know why there are no local teams playing in the Champions Cup round of 16 this coming weekend, whereas in the first two seasons every South African team that started out in the competition made it that far, there’s the reason.

In the first two seasons there were no foreign wins on South African soil. Well, not in the Pool phases anyway. It was La Rochelle who broke the duck when they pipped the Stormers by one point in last season’s round of 16 game in Cape Town.

NO OBVIOUS ADVANTAGE PLAYING AT HOME THIS YEAR

La Rochelle, champions of Europe at the time, were beaten when they came to South Africa for the first time. They lost to the Stormers in their Pool game a few months before returning the favour in the first knock-out game.

But this year there was no obvious home advantage for South African sides. On the weekend that the Bulls were beaten by Storm Darragh, the Stormers hosted Toulon in Port Elizabeth and lost. A week later Saints went to Loftus and won. In the URC, visiting teams winning is becoming more frequent than in the first two seasons.

Is it working the other way around? There’s no real evidence that there is. By my count, the Bulls’ win over Leinster in the 2022 URC semifinal was the only time a South African team has won against a rated team in either competition at their home venue.

The closest the Stormers came was when they drew with Leinster in Dublin the season before last. They have yet to beat Ulster in Ulster, Munster in Munster, or Glasgow in Glasgow. The closest they have ever come to winning in Scotland was when they drew their first ever game against Edinburgh at what was then known as the DAM Health Stadium.

The Sharks beat Bordeaux away in the Champions Cup in their first season of trying but that Bordeaux team wasn’t the Bordeaux team it has become. That same campaign the Sharks were quite comprehensively outplayed by Harlequins at The Stoop and Toulouse in Toulouse (quarterfinal) and I can’t recall them every beating Ulster, Munster or Leinster away in the URC.

The Lions broke what was a disturbing duck for SA teams away against the weakest of the Irish provinces, Connacht, in Galway last season and were followed by the Stormers and Bulls, but otherwise the other Irish fortresses remain impregnable but for that 2022 URC semifinal.

Perhaps one of the biggest away wins was the Sharks beating Clermont-Auvergne in last year’s Consolation Cup…sorry, Challenge Cup… semifinal. But then the significance of that win is undermined when you remind yourself that the game was played at The Stoop. In other words, a neutral venue.

WE DON'T WANT TO BE EUROPA LEAGUE MATERIAL

The Sharks did go on to win the Challenge Cup, but let’s put that in perspective too - the Gloucester team they beat in the final was playing in the Challenge Cup because they weren’t one of the top eight teams in the Gallagher Premiership. The top eight go to the Champions Cup in that competition. Eight out of 10. Says it all, doesn’t it?

What you think of different European competitions might depend on who you support. A Liverpool supporter wants and expects his team to be in the Champions League. That’s the bottom line. A West Ham supporter by contrast will be happy to make the Europa Conference League.

But for the elite South African teams, if they have to be playing this weekend they would have preferred it to be in the Champions Cup. The one that matters.

Getting into the Champions Cup just requires a top eight finish in the URC, which isn’t hard to do, but getting into the Champions Cup knock-outs is going to become harder unless SA sides start re-establishing this country as a frontier others shall not cross.