GAVIN RICH: SA’s Champions Cup role ends with a whimper as Sharks bomb out too

The Sharks’ humiliating 66-12 defeat at the hands of Bordeaux Begles brought to a close an abject season for SA’s participation in the Champions Cup.

With the Bulls and Stormers already out, the defeat in the final day of pool action confirmed that for the first time there will be no SA team in the round of 16 of the elite European competition and therefore no chance for a local side to make a much-needed statement.

After three years in the competition, there is a desperate need for a local selling point but we will have to wait another year, and though big crowds have turned up in Durban and Cape Town, the images transmitted from Loftus at the weekend onto foreign television screens did nothing to contradict the perception among overseas critics that there is local apathy towards a competition that European rugby followers have historically been so passionate about.

The Bulls were effectively playing a dead rubber as they couldn’t progress in the Champions Cup in their game against Stade Francais, but the empty stands were such a stark contrast to what was happening everywhere else. The stadium in Bordeaux was full when the Sharks were annihilated by a Damian Penaud masterclass, and ditto the La Defense Arena in Paris, where the Stormers conspired against themselves in their loss to Racing 92.

In fact, all the games I got a glance at over the deciding weekend of the Pool phase were in keeping with what we have seen overseas, with an electric atmosphere evident in Dublin, where Leinster thumped Bath, and at the admittedly much smaller Twickenham Stoop, where Harlequins beat Glasgow Warriors.

Talking of smaller venues, the narrative that the elite European competition is not selling well in SA would have been furthered by the turnout at another sports event that took place not far from Loftus. The Betway SA20 game at Centurion Park was played at the same time as the Bulls game and it attracted a full house. The capacity there is probably not more than 15,000, but it was still significantly more than the 10,369 people that were at Loftus.

I am not ready to subscribe to any argument that rugby is losing ground to cricket, but given the standing of rugby as a sport and the Bulls as a brand in Pretoria, you’d have expected the cricket to take a hit because of the fixture clash rather than the other way around.

Yet it is understandable why the Champions Cup is taking time to catch on in SA. If the Bulls were interested in drawing a big crowd to the game, they did not help themselves by going understrength and losing by a big score away to the unrated French team, Castres, the week before.

To be fair, it is not just the SA coaches that choose their moments to go understrength in the competition, particularly in away games. The Stade Francais side that was well beaten at Loftus was effectively a second string team and the reason for that was because they are languishing on the Top 14 log.

The French clubs’ approach to the Champions Cup has always been dictated by where they stand in their league. The promotion-relegation system in France is incredibly cut throat, with the two bottom teams dropping out, and once you are in the zone, it becomes a huge battle for survival that becomes the overarching emphasis of that team’s season.

A quasi-promotion-relegation system is in play in the United Rugby Championship (URC) in the sense that qualifying for the Champions Cup, which means finishing in the top eight, has standing. No-one wants to play in the low-key Challenge Cup.

Stormers coach John Dobson said before his team’s game in Paris that his men would go all out to win and make it into the Champions Cup round of 16. Which they did. No-one could fault their effort over the 80 minutes.

But if they were taking a win at all-costs mentality into the game, and prioritising the competition above all else, star players such as Warrick Gelant, Manie Libbok, BJ Dixon and Deon Fourie would not have been watching from the stands. Dobson chose to leave them out because his team, outside the top eight in the URC and facing an uphill battle to qualify for both the play-offs and the 2026 Champions Cup, faces a big league game against Leinster in Dublin on Saturday.

He will go full strength in Dublin as, in the words he used after his team’s impressive win over Sale the previous week, “the URC is our day job”. It is a scenario or quandary not unlike the one faced by relegation-threatened French teams. But while going understrength is understandable, it does nothing to help sell the competition to the local audience. Neither did Sunday’s Sharks capitulation after a promising start.