CAPE TOWN - That less than 20 000 people turned up at Newlands for last week’s Super Rugby clash between the Stormers and the Jaguares should be seen as concerning by rugby bosses.
We know crowd numbers have dwindled in Super Rugby in recent years, even at Newlands, which has been consistently the top venue in the competition in terms of people filing through the turnstiles. And there are also a myriad reasons for it, one of them being a competition format that leaves many spectators feeling confused.
The best format for a professional sporting competition is the most uncomplicated one, the one that can be most easily understood. Super Rugby is a millions miles from it. Even those of us who work in the game full time occasionally get caught out by the foibles of the complicated conference format.
But even given the waning popularity of Super Rugby, you would have anticipated that the excellent win scored by the Stormers over the old traditional rivals, the Bulls, the previous week would ensure a much larger turn-out last weekend.
More so if you consider that the Stormers are now clearly playing the type of rugby the long suffering Cape public, desperate for entertainment, have been crying out for.
That the win over the Bulls never had the desired effect of attracting fans back to the stadium may have less to do with the public’s disconnect with the Super Rugby product than it has to do with the general apathy towards rugby that arose out of the Springboks’ disastrous 2016 campaign under the coaching of Allister Coetzee.
As the showcase of the South African game, the Boks do carry a massive responsibility, and when they perform as abjectly as they performed last year, it can obscure the view of good things happening lower down and at other levels.
For instance, the widespread perception that arose out of the Bok disaster, that 2016 was just a complete all-round nightmare for South African rugby, was not 100 percent correct.
The Lions may have been given a leg up by the odd competition format, but they were still one of the more outstanding teams in Super Rugby, and reached the final of the competition employing a playing style that was a massive improvement on what we might consider standard South African fare.
The Sharks didn’t consider themselves to have enjoyed a successful season but they did win two of their five games against New Zealand opposition and were very competitive in two others. I was at Kings Park on the day they hammered the eventual champions, the Hurricanes, 32-15. It was an impressive performance. That the Durban team lost their quarterfinal so comprehensively was because they had to travel to New Zealand.
The South African teams were generally better than the Australian teams in Super Rugby last year, yet the Wallabies, while experiencing a poor season by their standards, still did considerably better than the Boks and remain some way ahead of them on the world rankings.
My point is that while the South African performances in Super Rugby in 2016 weren’t great, they didn’t merit the disaster that the Bok international season turned out to be, and there was a moment of honesty towards the end of the November tour when Coetzee admitted he may have made a mistake by not embracing more of the Lions approach and culture when he first started out.
It is still early days in Super Rugby, but the type of game the South African teams have generally committed themselves to, and the progress some of them appear to have made, may have removed any remaining excuse for the Boks not to embrace a more innovative and dynamic playing template.
The Stormers, Lions and Cheetahs are all playing quick tempo ball-in-hand rugby, and while the Bulls have floundered in their opening two matches, they do have attacking intent.
The Sharks looked like they were stuck in the past in their opening game against the Reds, when perhaps the humidity, which turns the ball into a cake of soap, mitigated against their stated intention to be adventurous, but they did show a big improvement when it came to attacking intent against the Brumbies last week.
In 2016 Coetzee had many valid excuses for his failure, and they were probably a factor in saving him his job. But the time for excuses is now over.
The Bok coach now does have training camps to prepare his players for the international season and to create a team culture, which is something he was denied and undeniably kept him back 12 months ago, and he will also be drawing his playing resources from teams that mostly play modern rugby.