With the Champions Cup starting this weekend, it was good timing that the first United Rugby Championship derby of the season should deliver a contest in Durban that should have woken up SA fans to the fact that there’s more to rugby than just the national team.
The Sharks and Stormers both make mistakes that gave the impression of the Kings Park fixture being a scrappy game, but those who are accustomed to what conditions are like in that part of the world at this time of the year will have understood it. Given the way the ball becomes like a cake of soap in the humidity, the skill levels on display were actually phenomenal.
It is often the case that the performances of local players lift for derbies, and that was the case in this game. We all know how good Aphelele Fassi has become so his clinching of an umpteenth official man of the match award has become almost another day at the office for the Sharks and Bok No 15. And make no mistake, he played a huge part in the Sharks’ win.
But for me it was Boks who can be considered fringe players in Rassie Erasmus’ system that most underlined the impressive depth the national coach has available to him. The best example was tighthead prop Neethling Fouche. The Stormers No 3 is behind Frans Malherbe at the Cape franchise and while he was in one of Erasmus’ early squads, he never got to play for the Boks in 2024.
He is at best possibly fourth or fifth on the pecking order, and yet in the Kings Park derby he did something that no other international prop has been able to do with the world-rated Sharks loose head Ox Nché this year, or indeed in recent memory: he dominated him.
The way the Stormers bossed the Sharks in the scrums, with Fouche on Nché being so pivotal to that dominance, might speak to the important role that Bongi Mbonambi plays in helping enhance the reputation of the players around him at the Sharks and the Boks.
Eben Etzebeth has described Mbonambi as the world’s best scrumming hooker, and the role of the hooker in establishing scrumming supremacy is often undervalued. Mbonambi did not play against the Stormers because of a family bereavement, with Dylan Richardson, who is relatively new to the position, wearing the No 2 jersey in his place. By contrast the Stormers hooker Joseph Dweba, for all his other weaknesses, is probably the next best to Mbonambi locally regarding scrumming.
It is not just the front row though in which this country has huge depth that was writ large at Kings Park. The Sharks’ blindside flanker Vincent Tshituka played a big role in the Sharks win with at least one try-saving tackle and several other telling interventions, but I thought he was significantly upstaged by the Stormers No 7 Ben-Jason Dixon.
Dixon started against the All Blacks in Johannesburg during the Rugby Championship and featured in the away game against Argentina, but was not part of the end of year tour. Erasmus does rate him highly though and would have given him pointers on what he needs to do to cement a place in his plans for the World Cup 2027 challenge.
Whether the Durban game was an expression of adaptations he has made under Erasmus’ direction only he will know, but it was a game in which Dixon showed why the Bok coach and his Stormers counterpart John Dobson liken him to 2024 World Rugby player of the year Pieter-Steph du Toit. He gets through an incredible amount of work and against the Sharks he was particularly prominent as a ball carrier.
It’s also hard to imagine that the Stormers’ 21-year-old wing Suleiman Hartzenberg would still be waiting for a national call if he was available for any other country, and ditto the equally young and exciting Sharks wing Ethan Hooker. The Westville old boy is primarily a centre and so is Hartzenberg. As indeed is the Bulls’ Canan Moodie. So outside centre is another position nailed down by legendary Boks in Jesse Kriel and Lukhanyo Am that is well covered.
Flyhalf too, though the Durban game was yet another advert to the extremes Manie Libbok brings to his game. The disallowed try would not have happened were it not for his attacking genius, but it was his knock-on that prevented what would have been the match clincher after the hooter from being awarded.
The SA depth will go on show to a wider audience as the Champions Cup clicks in over the next two weeks, and the Sharks’ presence thanks to them winning the Challenge Cup last season will strengthen the local challenge. Bring Etzebeth and Mbonambi back and the Sharks have a team with the potential to conquer Europe in the same way the Boks have conquered the world.
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