On Wednesday, about 10 weeks after Brian van Rooyen assumed the role of president of the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu), he announced a complete restructuring of the professional game while entrenching the power of amateur administrators. Let it never be said that South African rugby does not know how to turn hard times into a crisis.
Three years after Sarfu’s finance people created the vehicle of SA Rugby as a wholly owned tax-dodging subsidiary, the decision of last week’s bosberaad was to emasculate it. Henceforth SA Rugby will market the game, not run it.
Perhaps this was always the intention, but what actually happened was that its MD, Rian Oberholzer, assumed the mantle of power and hid behind the token presence of Sarfu’s immediate past president, Silas Nkanunu whenever it suited him. Sarfu was regarded by Oberholzer as an amateur body lacking the skills to run a multimillion-rand business.
As a successful businessman Van Rooyen clearly rejects that idea and has sought to return the game to its roots. The irony being, of course, that the new MD of SA Rugby (which position is even now being advertised in the press) is likely to be as powerless as Nkanunu, while the president of Sarfu will revert to being what Danie Craven and Louis Luyt always intended: lord of all he surveys.
It is this aspect in particular that led Morné du Plessis to resign from Sarfu’s executive committee at the completion of the bosberaad, thereby removing from the mix the one person with true world status in the game. It is said that Du Plessis and Van Rooyen were oil and water from day one and that the only surprising aspect was that it took the former two months to use the door.
Du Plessis knew what was coming from Van Rooyen on Wednesday and wanted no part of it. In particular Du Plessis saw the reversion to a 14 team Currie Cup format as a disastrous return to the days of block votes and hidden agendas. What was the point of debating something for five hours only to have the resolution squashed by a change of mind over post-meeting drinks, he said.
Certainly, Du Plessis would have been appalled at the codicil to the decision to revert that said, ‘The broader detail to be worked out following further consultation and discussion with relevant sponsorsâ€. Remember that the Currie Cup was restructured two years ago as a consequence of the findings of a report by the Accenture consulting group.
It was a report that cost R3-million.
Of course, back in those heady days, Sarfu had money to burn, but times have changed. That surely is the grim fact behind the restructuring of the Super 12. Out go the Stormers, Cats, Sharks and Bulls; in come the Blue Bulls, Western Province, Golden Lions and KwaZulu-Natal Sharks.
It is clearly counterproductive (because it costs way too much money) to have two brands associated with one province, so let’s just go back to the good old days. Nobody cares except Free State, who have fallen through a crack in the pavement and will need to be compensated in some as yet undreamt of way by Van Rooyen.
Believe it or not there is much sense in the restructuring of both competitions. The knee-jerk reactions of most stakeholders are largely caused by the fact that Oberholzer and his cronies invested six years in arguing that provincialism was bad, branding good. And ultimately every argument is subservient to results. Van Rooyen better hope that the 2004 Super 12 is a damn sight better for South African sides than the 2003 version.