“Who cares about the Shield other than maybe Jake [White] and Dobbo [John Dobson]?” The question, asked in response to a story written in an attempt to hype Saturday’s United Rugby Championship (URC) derby between the Bulls and Stormers around the local conference trophy, was a fair one. Even those two coaches, White of the Bulls and Dobson of the Stormers, have been a bit ambiguous about its importance.
Though White has spoken up the Shield in some of his press conferences, he said in a television interview ahead of his team’s first derby that he wasn’t interested in the Shield trophy. What he was saying was completely understandable — the URC trophy is the main prize.
But while the Shield might not be hyped, it is the only means to determine SA’s leading team/franchise, with authenticity being added by making only the derby games count towards the Shield logs.
Winning the Currie Cup meant a lot to the Pumas the year before last and the Cheetahs last season, and the finals in both seasons were big occasions. But the Currie Cup is now a development competition and no more than that, with the top unions likely to adopt an under-23 selection limit .
It has been heading that way for a long time. The last really big full strength final might have been 2010, when a Sharks team featuring all its Springboks beat a star laden Western Province team in Durban. Even then, the teams had reached the decider by coming through an understrength league phase.
Since then, it’s been the conference winners, in both Super Rugby and then URC, that have effectively been the top professional teams in SA. It was great for the Pumas to win the Currie Cup in 2021/22 but the country’s top team was undeniably the Stormers, who had won the URC final the previous week. Ditto last season.
Trying to preserve the importance of the Currie Cup trophy is laudable but also misguided in that it comes at a cost. This year the Currie Cup is being scheduled for a window where it can take centre stage in the eyes of the public, but unfortunately it coincides with what should now be the off-season for SA’s franchise and provincial players — July through to September.
This year it will be run to the same format as last year, with eight A Section provinces and six B Section, but next year we will see all 14 provincial unions included, with the 10 teams not represented in the URC playing for a separate trophy at first. The top four teams in that competition, to be played at the same time as the URC, will go into the Currie Cup, where they will play against the four URC franchises.
It’s a sensible formula, or would be if there was a proper window for the URC teams to play the streamlined eight team Currie Cup at full strength. But that isn’t going to happen, firstly because it coincides with the Rugby Championship, meaning no Boks will be involved, and secondly because commitment to an off-season competition means players have to be rested during the season. That leads to depth being too thinly spread. To put it simply, if you start accepting you have a 12 month season something is going to have to give, and what will give is the chances of the big teams being at their optimum in the cross-hemisphere competitions.
As the Bulls found over the past two seasons, putting a big effort into both the Currie Cup and the international competitions just isn’t sustainable.
Given how difficult it already is for the coaches to balance their resources across a long season so players get the proper rest they need for physiological and welfare reasons, adding a competition in the off-season is daft. Clearly the Sharks think so, for they made it known during a media presentation in Durban last weekend that they are thinking of calling their Currie Cup team the Wildebeests to reflect that it is not their senior representative team.
It makes sense for the other 10 provinces to have something to play for, but then stick with it as the SA Cup. And offer a place in the following season’s Challenge Cup as an incentive for the winner.
Gert Smal, a multiple Currie Cup winner as both a player and a coach, struck a chord with many when he suggested the Currie Cup trophy should be put in a museum. It will only ever have its old standing if SA withdraws from the European competitions, which hopefully will never happen. It would be naive to pretend it can possibly have the standing it has had for most of its history when the top four unions, through necessity, treat it as an under-23 competition.
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