STRIKING IT RICH: Take a cue from Rassie and make rugby the main thing

STILL CONFUSION ABOUT THE TWO COMPETITIONS

There can’t have been many better places to watch Investec Champions Cup rugby than the dining room/bar area of the Buccaneers Beach Lodge. Perched high above the Chintsa Lagoon on the Eastern Cape coast and with a view out over the bay that extends as far as the Cape Morgan lighthouse. I know that because on a clear night you can see it flashing in the distance.

There might also not have been a better place to get some perspective on how much education still needs to be done around the two competitions South African teams now compete in. Back in the day, bars or television rooms of the establishment I was spending my Easter Saturday at would be filled with people who just wanted to watch the rugby.

From my varsity days, I can recall people thronging in the pub at a hotel in Hogsback to watch Natal play an arbitrary Currie Cup game. Natal! Hogsback isn’t even in what is now KZN. It’s in the Eastern Cape. I had a similar experience on a long weekend trip to the old Mazeppa Bay hotel, now sadly no longer in existence. Again it was Natal. Natal against Free State. It was 1989. The year before Natal became really formidable. Natal dominated the first half but got blown away in the second.

Apologies for the digression, my wife flew back to Cape Town from East London on Sunday and I have spent this down week, and thank you Stormers and Bulls for making that possible by not winning your round of 16 games, on my own. Well, alone but for a trio of fish eagles making a racket every evening from the opposite side of the lagoon to where my unit is situated. Trio? There are indeed three of them, so maybe the pair have an adolescent child.

Anyway, back to the rugby. I wasn’t completely alone. There were people who drifted in and out. It just wasn’t the rugby they were interested in. They were there to enjoy the view and the ambience. But people kept asking me what game was on, and “What competition is this?” A gentleman from Johannesburg summed up what might be quite a widespread feeling: “I like rugby but I am confused these days about what I am watching, every week it’s a different competition.”

If you subscribe to Supersport you should know. There’s the much played advert where various ex-players promote it as the greatest club competition in the world. But maybe there isn’t enough explanation generally of what the difference is between the URC and the Champions Cup.

I may have done this in this column before, in which case apologies for that, but it is easy to explain if you reference soccer. The Champions Cup is the Champions League of rugby and the URC is the Premier League, or domestic competition.

Yes, I know that it is hard to imagine the URC as a domestic competition, given that your team sometimes has to go to Treviso. Which is in Italy. A sod of a long way away. But we live in a world where the Bulls playing the Stormers, two teams representing cities that are 1600 kilometres apart, is seen as a derby. In the old days, derbies were between teams who lived next door to each other.

At school the derby was against the school down the road. Joburg and Pretoria are close enough for a Lions/Bulls game to always be a derby. Western Province against Boland? Definitely. But again soccer is the better example. Liverpool against Everton is definitely a derby, and ditto Manchester United against Manchester City. Sorry I’m reluctant to cite Spurs against Arsenal because those teams appear to inhabit different planets right now and it renders them being from the same city kind of irrelevant…

SOCIAL MEDIA DOESN’T REACH EVERYONE

So my theory is that part of the reason that the EPCR competitions - by the way the Challenge Cup is the equivalent of the Europa League - aren’t catching on in this country is because the local franchises/clubs are too preoccupied with social media. Which they think everyone in this country follows. But apparently the fraction of people on X and Instagram is not really that great, like 10 to 15 per cent of this country’s population is on X (twitter), and even less than that on Instagram. And not all of those will be active users. I’m on both but don’t participate much if at all.

11-tries! 🔥

Watch the instant #InvestecChampionsCup highlights on YouTube ➡️ https://t.co/PyoAbzW1sk pic.twitter.com/UqmjN9ue38 — Investec Champions Cup (@ChampionsCup) April 5, 2026

The people who I came across this past weekend who weren’t clued up on what rugby was on didn’t appear to be part of that less than 15 per cent. So what about the other 85 per cent?

With the exception of the Stormers, what the mainstream media gets out of the franchises is just not good enough if they really want to sell the competitions their teams compete in.

Bordeaux-Begles are the champions of Europe. When they came to Pretoria last December the Bulls treated it like it was just another game. When the Sharks went to Galway last week, we were sent a two minute audio recording from Nick Hatton. Nick is a good guy, but what could he say when he didn’t have the media there prompting him to ask questions.

Okay, so the Connacht trip was a nothing game for the Sharks. They got what they wanted from that match - they lost and can now focus completely on the URC. But at other times, when there are bigger EPCR games, it is a similar story.

The Sharks do like their social media. On a zoom press conference call I was on with their management recently we were told that the Sharks’ social media is soaring and they are among the best in the world. There was a lot said about that, more than there was about the rugby, with questions about rugby generally being met with something akin to “No comment”. While it was happening my brain cued Rassie at the start of his tenure as Bok coach - “Let the main thing be the main thing”. The rugby.

SWEET CAROLINE IS MAYBE JUST TOO SWEET FOR VISITING TEAMS

If the Stormers draw 45 000 people to their next two home games, they will break a record for home crowd attendance during the regular season of the URC. The games are against Connacht and Leinster, and top of the log is at stake, so my money says they will achieve that target, even though the Glasgow game is at the wrong time of day for optimum turn-out in Cape Town (or anywhere): The game kicks off at 13.45.

Clearly the Stormers are doing something right, and they are also relying on what Rassie would call the main thing. They don’t stage games in conjunction with pop concerts, they don’t overdo the peripheral side-shows and activations. People go to DHL Stadium to watch rugby.

But even there they are guilty of something my colleague Brenden Nel referred to earlier this week. Sometimes the music played during a game is overdone. That it impacts on the flow of a game was illustrated to me when the Stormers were struggling against Leicester Tigers back in January while Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ and other songs of that ilk were being played over the stadium sound system.

Then something in that sound system went faulty, and it happened to be late in the game. With the music gone, suddenly it felt like an old rugby stadium again, and the crowd really got into supporting their team. The noise decibels of the supporters, as opposed to the singers, were raised several levels, and it coincided with the Stormers pulling together and finishing the game strongly.

I thought of that when hearing the DJ rev up the crowd before kick-off at Toulon’s Stade Mayol. He got the crowd to chant for their team. It would have been intimidating for the visiting team, and actually, speaking tongue in cheek of course, it might have frightened the referee, who made some bizarre decisions in favour of the home team late in the game.

As a kid my second home was Kings Park (well along with the Kingsmead cricket ground down the road). There was a rousing atmosphere in the ground before kick-off, even in the Currie Cup B Section years, and it was driven by the man who ran onto the field before kick-off with a banana (from memory it was sometimes a big blow up banana, and on others it was part of a banana tree).

He’d run out of the tunnel to a rousing welcome, he would run to the Umgeni end and flourish the banana apparel in that direction, and everyone sitting at that end of the ground would emit a throaty roar. He’d then run to the openside of the stadium, and do the same, and then the town end. It got everyone in the crowd up for the occasion, and no doubt the Natal team, known in those days as the Banana Boys, too, as they’d run out to an electric atmosphere.

I’m not saying that the people at a rugby match should be there for the sole purpose of intimidating the opposition or for rousing their own team, but it could enhance the rugby more than Sweet Caroline. Brenden often talks about the closing stages of the Bulls URC final against Glasgow a few years ago. When the Bulls were chasing the game and needed the crowd to be behind them, and that is surely the point of having home ground advantage, the stadium was enveloped in pop music and the crowd could not be heard. Glasgow, where apparently the crowd is very much in evidence in tight moments, like it is in places like Toulon, must have loved that.

DODGED A BULLET

So everyone involved was understandably gutted when the Stormers and the Bulls bowed out of the Champions Cup in such close games, but let me be honest - while the Stormers were building up to win the game in Toulon with that final sustained attack, and like everyone else I was looking for Sacha to drop into the pocket and attempt a drop-goal, I was in two minds.

It can be summed up by the words “Do you guys know what you are playing for here?” Yes, there’d be pride in making a Champions Cup quarterfinal, but for the Stormers in particular there’d be a curve ball in the sense they’d be playing an EPCR game just one week before the start of a crucial home two game sequence in the URC against Connacht and Glasgow.

Were they to win the quarterfinal had they made it, and why play in it if you don’t want to win it, they’d then be playing Leinster away in the semifinal of the Champions Cup a week before two tough away games to end the URC regular season against Ulster and Cardiff. Do the Stormers have the depth to be successful across both rosters? I don’t think they do. Not yet.

And actually I don’t think Glasgow do either. If they win against Toulon on Saturday, which they should, they will be playing non-stop until the end of the season if they are to win both competitions.

BREAK THE BANK AND LURE RIBBANS HOME

It would be a lie to suggest there were no South African winners in the Champions Cup last weekend. Franco Smith won, so did Jacques Nienaber, but what I am referring to is two players who stood out for their teams. Former Western Province and England lock David Ribbans was the best player on the field playing for Toulon against the Stormers, as he was in Gqeberha in December 2024.

And Thomas du Toit was man of the match for the way he shifted momentum Bath’s way when they beat Saracens. By the way, Johann van Graan, the Bath coach, was therefore another South African winner at the weekend.

But back to Ribbans and Du Toit. The latter is already committed to coming back, having been netted by his former team, the Sharks, who have the money to meet what must have been a stiff asking price. But what about Ribbans coming back home given that the Stormers will be losing Salmaan Moerat to La Rochelle and Ruben van Heerden to Montpellier next year?

The Stormers need four quality locks for their game model and they’ve just lost half of them. They tried for Cobus Wiese but the Bulls’ financial clout kept the former Stormer loyal to his new employers. I’d have gone for JF van Heerden, who doesn’t seem to be playing much under Johan Ackermann, and is a player with a huge future, but he’s contracted to the Bulls until 2028.

Ribbans is going to be available to play for the Boks next year and would be a great signing for the Stormers. Unfortunately Toulon apparently pay him a mint, but given the way he played this past weekend, he’d be worth breaking the bank for.

NO STOPPING TO DRINK WITH ANY BOKS THIS TIME

So those who read this column the week before last will know that this trip is part of an annual - actually it is bi-annual - pilgrimage to the Drakensberg, where I have timeshare. I came up on the R56, the quickest route from Cape Town to southern KZN, but on the return journey I am doing the coastal route, meaning mainly N2 from Kokstad to Cape Town. But the next phase of my journey, which starts in a couple of minutes, I am going to take the R72. Meaning the road through Port Alfred to Gqeberha, with the rejoin with the N2 at the Nanaga Farm Stall, rather than the N2 through Qonce (King Williams Town) and Makhanda (Grahamstown).

It won’t be like one of my previous journeys along that road. In 2019 I stopped here for a night after spending some time in Durban interviewing former Boks (actually there’s no such thing as a former Bok, once you are capped you are always a Bok) on my way back to Cape Town.

It was while overnighting here at Buccaneers that I remembered Garry Pagel, an unsung hero of the 1995 World Cup win, lives in Kleinemonde, about 15 kilometres from Port Alfred. So I called Garry and asked him if he was available, and we agreed to do lunch at The Pig and Whistle in Bathurst. The Pig is the oldest pub in South Africa, and when I was studying in Grahamstown in the 1980s it was a tradition among some Rhodes students from Cape Town to have a drink there and then see if they could get back to the Pig and Whistle in Rondebosch (no longer there) before closing time. I was living in Durban in those days so didn’t qualify, but I understand that some of them managed it. Although it didn’t seem sane to me that you should start such a long journey with a beer.

Anyway, enough digression…what I was building to say was that I didn’t target the Rondebosch Pig and Whistle that day, but I did have beers with two Bok props in two separate locations quite far apart - lunch with Pagel in Bathurst (I had to drive so didn’t overdo it) and then quite a few beers (and the book interview of course) with Rob Kempson in his local in what was then still Port Elizabeth.

Oh, and the day started off bright and early - about 40 kilometres from here, in a suburb of what was then East London, but now Kugomko City, from memory it was Beacon Bay, where I interviewed Russell Bennett, a Bok fullback in 1997 and also formerly a Shark and Border. No, I didn’t have beers with Russell, even though in those days he was working for SAB. It was way too early. Plus he had a working day ahead of him.