Covid-19: Currie Cup limps to conclusion after dire semi-finals underline difficulties

Siya Kolisi (captain) of WP leads the team out during the Carling Currie Cup semi-final match between DHL Western Province and Cell C Sharks at DHL Newlands in Cape Town. (Photo: Ashley Vlotman / Gallo Images)

By Craig Ray

24 Jan 2021

On 20 January Rassie Erasmus, director of rugby at the SA Rugby Union (Saru), made a passionate and well-argued defence of why the standard of rugby in the Currie Cup has been below par. But even he would be hard-pressed to excuse the dirge dished up over the weekend in the two semi-finals in Pretoria and Cape Town.

See Rassie Erasmus’s defence here

The Bulls will meet the Sharks in next week’s Currie Cup final at Loftus Versfeld. This past Saturday, 23 January, the Bulls beat the Lions 26-21 at Loftus and the Sharks overcame Western Province (WP) 19-9, which was the home team’s final competitive match at Newlands. The union will play its future matches at the Cape Town Stadium.

The latter match was particularly painful to witness. It was supposed to be a Newlands swansong, but it resembled a funeral march. The 133-year-old stadium (technically the stands were built in 1919, but it opened in 1888), will be decommissioned soon.

This was no grand send-off, and perhaps it was fitting that the two teams presided over the last rites at Newlands with the type of rugby that wouldn’t have been amiss in the late 19th century.

The match appeared to be played in slow motion, there were hardly more than three passes in any phase of play and set pieces were a shambles. It was like watching a series of collapsed scrums on a never-ending repeat. Almost every breakdown ended in a penalty and it felt like every other movement that encompassed a pass, resulted in a knock-on.

The Bulls contest was not much better, although the teams managed to conjure a few attractive tries. But the litany of errors was only marginally better than the later game. In both matches, the referees also have to take some blame. Rasta Rasivhenge and Marius van der Westhuizen might know the laws intimately, but neither demonstrated any “feel” for the game.

Marginal breakdown calls that, had they been allowed to go on for a few more seconds might have resulted in a better spectacle, were penalised with almost maniacal zeal by the two lawmen. Hopefully, Jaco Peyper is asked to referee the final because the sport needs all the help it can get right now.

Players and coaches doing the best they can in the conditions

There was no lack of courage and commitment from the players. They put their bodies on the line and committed to contact and pain as they always do, but only the most one-eyed witness to those matches could claim they provided any entertainment value.

They were painful to watch because the reality is that professional rugby in the time of Covid-19 has probably been harder hit than any other sport.

By its very nature, rugby is a gladiatorial sport and the lack of fans and atmosphere, coupled with the sapping high-summer conditions, have robbed the contests of their soul. The players’ minds may be willing, but their bodies and skills are not able to cope with a combination of heat, a greasy ball and the lack of the intangible mental boost they receive from the terraces.

It might sound ridiculous, and it’s certainly impossible to measure, but the dead atmosphere inside the cavernous empty stadiums has taken away a few percentage points from performances.

The reasons that the sport has to continue under these conditions have been dissected in these pages. It is about keeping the rugby alive through honouring broadcast agreements and earning money. But if we take a step back and ask the question, “has the Currie Cup, played through the height of summer been good for the sport?” the simple answer is, “no”.

This is not about blame. Players and coaches have done their utmost, in trying circumstances. Training minutes are down by half because of Covid-19 protocols. Squads have been disrupted because of Covid-19 positives and the effectiveness of training, in extreme heat, has also been diminished. It’s all added up to an inferior “product”.

Erasmus has said that with each passing week coaches and administrators are learning and adapting to a situation no one asked for, and no one had a playbook on.

And that’s fair enough, because right now the only positive is that there isn’t any more rugby scheduled for the next 10 weeks after the Currie Cup final.

The show must go on

But the show must go on, and on Saturday 30 January the Bulls will appear in their first Currie Cup final since 2016 and could win their first title since 2009. It’s a staggering thought that the Pretoria powerhouse has not won South Africa’s premier domestic trophy in more than a decade.

The Sharks, who were South Africa’s form team and leaders of Super Rugby when the 2020 Super Rugby tournament was suspended after seven rounds, have shown they are going to remain a force in local rugby.

Off the field, they are well run and ambitious. They recently concluded an equity partnership with MVM Holdings involving close to R100-million, and have done a separate marketing deal with the powerful Roc Nation management company.

MVM has not only paid the cash now, but has promised to be invested partners, which means its purse strings can be loosened from time to time to ensure its goal of making the Sharks a world rugby leader is met.

The Bulls, under coach Jake White, won Super Rugby Unlocked and have a chance to win the Currie Cup in his first full season in charge. They are also backed by private equity funding with local billionaires Patrice Motsepe and Johann Rupert as benefactors behind the union.

In a year that has hit all sports in the guts, and rugby particularly hard, it’s revealing that the two leading teams are the two that have the least off-field issues. They are well settled, have young CEOs with ambition and vision, and a war chest through private equity funding to comfortably survive in the short term, and thrive in the future.

The two most deserving teams will meet in the Currie Cup final on Saturday 30 January, but after what we’ve witnessed over the past two months, there is still little to set the heart racing. DM

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