South African rugby adds the awesome to the URC
England’s Premiership clubs want to join the United Rugby Championship and they want South Africa and Italy kicked out. It reads like an April Fool’s joke because it should be an April Fool’s Joke. It will not happen, writes Mark Keohane.
The United Rugby Championship, into its fourth season, is the number one club league competition in the world. France’s Top 14 follows and then you can take your pick of Japan’s League One, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa’s Super Rugby Pacifica and the English Premiership, once the bastion of club competitions but now in ruins.
South Africa’s departure from Super Rugby to the United Rugby Championship four seasons ago was a gift from the rugby gods to the Celtic Nations and Italy. It turned an unremarkable Pro Rugby League into a league leader.
South Africa has been at the forefront of everything that is marvellous about the URC, in league performance, in crowd attendance, in social media numbers, in digital numbers, in television numbers and in merging the best of the north with the best of the south.
South Africa, by way of the Stormers (twice) and Bulls (once) have had representation in every URC final, and it is South Africa that has hosted every final, twice in Cape Town and last season at Loftus Verseld in Pretoria.
The Stormers beat the Bulls in the first final and they lost in a dramatic final to Munster in Cape Town the next season. A URC record crowd of 56 300 attended the final. Last season’s final between the Bulls and Glasgow’s Warriors was also sold out.
Two away wins, both in South Africa, and one home win by the Stormers, is a marketer’s dream deck presentation to take to market, for sponsors, investors and broadcasters.
Record figures, in every aspect of the league, getting broken every season tells the story that South Africa was the missing ingredient and has produced the fizz from Pro 14 to URC.
Coca-Cola once tampered with their formula and quickly found out that if it ain’t broke then don’t try and fix it.
The URC has the formula. The Premiership is broken.
Why would the shareholders of the URC even entertain saving a rival league at the expense of their own?
Yip, it should be the 1st of April.
It is true that the Premiership clubs have put together a merger, in a proposal format, that will be sent to the URC’s Board, but the madness of it all is that South Africa and Italy, the two entities they want to replace with English teams, are among the URC’s shareholders and biggest decision-makers.
As my three year-old daughter tells me when she proposes something outrageous that won’t fly, and I say NO!: ‘Papa, it is only PRETEND’.
The Premiership Clubs merger proposal, at the expense of South Africa’s quartet of the Bulls, Lions, Sharks and Stormers and Italy’s Benetton and Zebre, will never happen.
Premiership’s URC plan to exclude SA teams
A URC, post 2030, that potentially includes the best of England’s clubs, would seem more real than the fiction of getting rid of South Africa and Italy.
South Africa is the golden goose in the URC and no one kills the goose laying eggs with such value.
The Vodacom Bulls, in their home semi-final against Leinster and final against the Warriors, totalled a two million television audience.
The URC has profited from the awesomeness of South African rugby and the Premiership has imploded because of the arrogance and ignorance of the English. Long may it continue.
