If the Currie Cup were an animal it would be on the endangered species list. A decade ago, it was regarded as the toughest domestic competition in the world, but in the wake of professionalism, a bunch of well-meaning administrators mucked it up.
They wanted to ”take the game to the people”, conveniently forgetting that when the product is right the people will come to the game.
When the product is wrong, of course, wild horses wouldn’t drag them there, no matter how much money is wasted by the marketing people. The one thing that administrators and marketers always forget is that sports fans have built-in bullshit detectors.
So you can dress up the Lions vs the Leopards at Ellis Park on a Friday night any way you like, but don’t ever expect more than 5 000 people to attend. The point was perfectly made by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch, when he wrote that the question to be posed was not why so few people attended, but why there were any at all.
So, as we approach the sharp end of this year’s competition and the sound of one hand clapping is heard again in the land, the management committee of the South African Rugby Union (Saru) needs to face an unpalatable truth.
The most unwieldy Currie Cup structure ever devised has resulted in business as usual: yet again, one of the Bulls, Lions, Cheetahs, Sharks or Western Province will not make the semifinals. Everyone else can go home.
Right now it looks odds on to be the Sharks, the Johnny-come-latelys of the Currie Cup who only emerged from the B section in the late 1980s. If the Sharks lose to Western Province in Durban on Saturday, it will be curtains for Dick Muir’s team.
Even if they win, they are reliant upon the Lions losing to the Cheetahs in the game that kicks off two hours later and then they still need some fortune on the final weekend of log play.
Given the verve with which the Sharks performed in the preliminary round, it would be a shame to lose them before the semifinals, but if truth be told, they are a young side in the process of rebuilding and will be immeasurably stronger in 12 months’ time.
So we’re down to the usual suspects and the only argument is over who will be at home in the knockout stage. Something utterly bizarre would have to happen for the Bulls not to have a semifinal at Loftus, while Saru’s daft structure means that the Lions could accrue twice as many log points as, say, Province and yet have to travel to Newlands in the last four.
It has been assumed that everyone is playing for second place, anyway, but the Bulls looked anything but ”three-peat” champions against the Cheetahs in Bloemfontein last week. They are as susceptible as ever to being forced into adopting plan B: in those circumstances the Bulls nearly always look like square pegs in round holes.
The problem is that it takes skill, discipline and a smile from dame fortune to break the Bulls’ stride and it almost never happens at Loftus. Which brings us back to that unpalatable truth: the Currie Cup has become way too predictable and there may even be a few dyed-in-the-wool Bulls fans who would see some merit in their team losing in three weeks’ time.
The way to guarantee unpredictability is not to expand the competition, but to contract it. Saru is so desperate to be seen to be fair to every union that it cannot understand that the whole point of sport in the first place is that it is unfair.
When Western Province plays Boland, it should not be on a level playing field. Boland should behave like country cousins, making themselves thoroughly unpopular by refusing to acknowledge the superiority of their opponents, but at the end of the day they should conveniently lose.
Hard though it may be to admit for those who live in the platteland, the Currie Cup is not their competition. The sooner Saru recognises that fact, the sooner the people will start coming back to the game.