Steve Morris : Rugby
We are barely a month away from the start of another round of Super 12 and a season which surely spells the end of the age of innocence for this country in a game which has mirrored the South African condition of blending the cutting edge of excellence with the desperate sloughs of utter ineptitude.
It is the season where the marketing men will finally have to put up or shut up; a period where the traditional ties on the terraces disappear and followers of the game are asked to lend their backing to sides which have nominally been strengthened by the South African Rugby Football Union’s (Sarfu) regionalisation policy by combining provinces under banners which owe more to the easing of the scriptwriter’s needs than to the realities of rugby culture.
The Golden Cats, Cape Stormers, Coastal Sharks and Northern Bulls are no longer sides owned — even if only in an ephemeral way — by the thousands who over the years have trudged their
way through the turnstiles at Ellis Park, Newlands, King’s Park, Free State Stadium, Boet Erasmus or Loftus Versveld.
They are merely flags of convenience for the realignment of the game as a television marketing tool. But there remain some very serious questions that only a full round of the southern hemisphere’s premier provincial competition can truly answer. This rearrangement has the potential to make three things happen.
One could prove to be a healthy and impactful facet of spreading the numbers of players exposed to the rigours of Super 12 and growth into a springboard for a broadening of the base of potential Springbok squad members; the second to alienate a public already disenchanted with the running of the game and results at provincial level; the last simply serving to concentrate the marketing cake on the table joined by the TV networks and Sarfu, cutting the provinces off from the primary wellspring of sponsorship.
To address the final segment of the equation first, in the professional era, where someone has, after all, to pick up the tab for the salaries being paid to the players, this is not necessarily a totally bad thing in pure cash terms. Sarfu is, after all, merely the sum of its members and any financial edge that the union can grab should ultimately flow down to the provinces. This, more than any other factor, must have been the motivation to endorse, through a Sarfu vote, the new dispensation.
But the potential problem that surely exists is that of a further concentration of power — in this case fiscal rather than figurative — in the hands of a sporting body already under fire for a lack of transparency in its dealings.
On the centralisation of power from a playing point of view, the realignment has given coach Nick Mallett an opportunity unique in the history of the game in this country.
Mallett will have a say in the composition of the sides to a degree where he will be able to ask for exposure for players with the potential to progress. The inherent flaw though is that, by grouping provinces rather than allowing the top four unions in the Currie Cup to draw from a pool of talent from the sides who finished outside the old Super 12 qualification barrier, the Springbok coach will not always be able to test out combinations he thinks might bear some closer scrutiny.
The All Blacks have, since the competition was initially established as Super 10, used the championship as a series of on-going trials games for their top players. Being as they are, tremendously pragmatic when it comes to rugby, the New Zealanders immediately latched onto the potential and have used it to the full.
It has taken us a longer and far more tortuously circuitous route to arrive at the same conclusions.
But by far the most important aspect of the changes of South African personnel in the Super 12 is that of the acceptance level among the ordinary follower of the game to the tinkering with traditional ties and the introduction of teams titled more for the adman than the aficionado.
The local pay station — which holds the lien on all rugby in this country following Louis Luyt being forced off the game after the 1995 World Cup for rugby to survive — was overwhelmed by the response to the competition with viewership figures in the early hours of the morning reaching heights few would have suspected possible.
Whether this will continue will only be proved during the course of the competition proper, now little more than a month away when the Cape Stormers entertain Wellington at Newlands on Friday February 27.
It will be further underlined the following day when the Northern Bulls meet the Golden Cats at Loftus and the Coastal Sharks face Auckland, the holders of the title, at King’s Park in Durban. For these opening matches represent the start of the South African campaign — thankfully on home soil this season, mitigating somewhat the disastrous starts of the past two years — and the acid test for the marketing men.
In an era where the TV rules more firmly than the turnstile, the viewership figures throughout the Super 12 will begin to gain an importance that perhaps the competition does not fully deserve in the South African context. And it will be no good telling us at the end of the competition that they have climbed if this is just a global audit. The real figure will be whether South Africans are going to watch their new sides or not, whether they are switching to rugby or sticking with a rerun of the Bold and the Beautiful instead.
For the fact remains that, having drawn up a formula that is aimed at successfully knocking Auckland off the perch they have occupied for two years by totally rearranging South African rugby, that formula will have to be seen to work. There have to be consistently good results from the pick-up sides for the experiment to succeed.
It is all well and good being a Natal fanatic in defeat, but to worry about the lack of the ability to win by a side called the Golden Cats? Somehow the mind cannot take the immediate quantum leap.