No South African team will contest the Champions Cup play-offs in May and while this is not a good reflection on the country’s participation in Europe, it illustrates that our locally based players are over-extended.
Since South Africa joined the European competitions – while keeping one foot in the southern hemisphere for the Springboks – it has meant that the top players from our major franchises play from January to December.
Much talk has been about the travel factor, but that is nonsense because the overseas teams tour South Africa. The simple reason that our teams are failing in the Champions Cup is that the opposition participates at their optimum.
At the same time, the SA coaches juggle stressed resources across the United Rugby Championship, the Champions and Challenge Cups, and the mandatory requirement to rest contracted Springboks for eight weeks of the year.
South African fans are understandably disgruntled but the reality is that most of the country’s best players are based in Europe and Japan. This means that at international level, Rassie Erasmus can assemble a World Cup-winning team but at provincial level, the Stormers, Bulls, Sharks, Lions, and Cheetahs are understaffed.
South African rugby can’t have its cake and eat it. They can’t be all things to everybody. Right now the system favours the Springboks because half of the starting line-up are being paid by their overseas bosses while the players are growing because of the cross-pollination of ideas they absorb from players from all over the world.
When the Springboks are winning World Cups and Rugby Championships, no South African is moaning about Champions Cup failure but unless the status quo changes, the provinces will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of Springbok success.
If you look at the weekend’s games, the Stormers rested a host of their big guns against Racing 92 because John Dobson has chosen to target this week’s URC match against a Leinster side that has 20 players with the Ireland Six Nations squad.
Dobson knows that he can’t win the Champions Cup and the URC title by playing his top players into the ground. The top guys can’t pitch up every week without suffering mental and physical fatigue.
At various points of a 52-week season, the SA coaches have to target games and shuffle their resources accordingly.
The European teams don’t have this problem. Their players have a three-month off-season across June, July and August. This period is when the Springboks are playing the Rugby Championship.
Similarly, the Aussies and Kiwis have an off-season our players can only dream of. They have no rugby from November to February.
I had a chuckle when some Shark sympathisers argued that the travel factor troubled the Sharks because they faded away dramatically in the second half of their 66-12 rout in Bordeaux. If travel from Durban to France was a problem, how do you explain Toulouse’s annihilation of Leicester?
The Sharks and Toulouse played in Durban and travelled back to France at the same time. The Sharks were pumped by 66 points while Toulouse put 80 past Leicester. There was no lethargy from Toulouse while the Sharks started with plenty of energy before succumbing to a vastly superior side.
This is what can happen to SA sides over an exhausting season. The Sharks went into the game with 15 players unavailable because of injury, prompting John Plumtree to say before the game, "I just want to manage this difficult patch and then get some bodies back so that, at some stage, we can focus on putting together a winning run.”
That will now be in the Challenge Cup where the Sharks are the defending champions and are joined by the Lions and Bulls.
Last year, the Sharks were knocked out of the URC early on and channelled all their focus into winning the Challenge Cup. They might do it again but don’t discount the Lions and the Bulls.
The bottom line is that as long as SA rugby’s best resources are scattered across the globe, the Champions Cup is an impossible dream.