There’s a series on Netflix you might have heard of, the United Rugby Championship? We’re in season three, and the plot is pretty perky, with gangs of brawlers from around the world vying for eight top spots as the season rattles to its conclusion.
The South African gangs were top dogs at the end of season one. They slipped up at the end of season two, allowing the fighting Irish to arrive in Cape Town and colonise their patch.
This time round everyone is scrapping as if their lives depended on it. Again the Irish are looking impressive, but one Irish side have a growing reputation for being knocked down before the end. Will it happen again in season three? This is just one of the questions we’re all asking as we tune in to the last four episodes before the season’s chilling finale.
Season three has been an inconclusive one for the four gangs of South Africa. The Sharks, with a wage bill that weighs them down, have swum in circles despite recent signs of improvement. The Stormers have blown hot and cold, and the Bulls have mostly gone on the rampage. Occasionally the blue herd runs into a brick wall.
The team who have been playing the most consistently exciting rugby of late have been the Lions, but they might yet fail to reach the play-offs. They finished ninth last year, one behind the over-hyped Sharks, who lost a game less because one of their matches was drawn.
Ivan van Rooyen, the Lions coach, will be reminding the Lions that they need to do one better in season three. It’s a tricky proposition, despite the fact that all but one of their next four matches are at home. We will learn more about why in a moment.
The Bulls and the Stormers are both in better-off positions than the Lions, but the Stormers’ hold on the future is precarious. It’s by no means certain that last season’s finalists qualify for a home quarter-final, which could be disastrous given the amount of travelling they’ve already done and the travel that – yes, aren’t they the lucky ones – they still have to do.
Contrast the Stormers’ fate with that of the Bulls and the Lions, who have got their travelling out of the way for the time being at least. For the next month they can hunker down, plan for every eventuality and the competition can come to them. It’s an advantage. And it could yet prove to be huge.
Of all the local teams, the 11th-placed Lions are the form side, having beaten an under-strength Leinster 44-12 at Ellis Park in episode 14. They are one of four teams spread-eagled on 39 points on the URC log at time of writing, the others being Edinburgh, Connacht and Ulster, all above them because they have won more matches. This is the kind of drama that Netflix likes, the kind of drama that makes you want to watch until the very end.
It seems, well, faintly off-sides, to speak ill of a team who’ve so clearly discovered their mis-placed Doornfontein mojo, but the Lions are a tad lucky to be where they are because they have won fewer games than Edinburgh, Connacht and Ulster.
Edinburgh, in eighth, so currently in the last play-off spot if the round-robin phase of the competition were to end now, have won two more matches than the Lions, while Connacht and Ulster have won one more match each.
The Lions are grouped with the Scottish and two Irish sides because, more than any other team in the competition, they have befriended the bonus point. At time of writing, after round 14, they have 11 of them, the joint highest number in the competition. This is one more than Leinster, Munster and the Bulls, and two more than the Glasgow Warriors.
The only other team who have also scored 11 bonus points are Cardiff, who are in 12th spot – the Lions are currently 11th – but who are out of contention for the play-offs. This is because, at time of writing, Cardiff only have 25 points, 14 points adrift of the bottleneck directly above them.
What we’re effectively seeing, in other words, with four episodes to go, is 11 teams wrestling for eight quarter final places. Within this scenario, is a contest within-a-contest, which will be the battle for the first four log places, because they ensure home advantage come the quarter-finals.
The Lions are not only the bonus-point burglars of the URC. They also lead all three of those above them on the same number of points in terms of tries scored. For the record, they’ve scored 54 tries, to Connacht’s 41 tries, Ulster’s 39 tries and Edinburgh’s 36 tries.
Over the season so far they’ve scored at the rate of fractionally under four tries per game, with only Leinster, the Bulls and the Glasgow Warriors having scored more tries more per game.
The Lions’ pile of bonus points isn’t only because they’re amongst the competition’s leading try-scorers. They’re also gained bonus points from narrow defeats.
Early on in their campaign, the Lions lost by two points to the Stormers at Ellis Park. A week after that they lost 17-16 to Edinburgh at Hive Park. In rounds three they lost to Benetton in Italy by five. Clearly, no-one cuts it finer than a Netflix Lion.
Importantly, three of the Lions’ four final fixtures – including against Munster this weekend – are at Ellis Park, where they like playing and like scoring tries. After Munster they’ve got out-of-contention Cardiff before a tough match against the Glasgow Warriors in their penultimate game.
In their final round-robin match of the competition in early June, they play the Stormers in Cape Town, a repeat of the fixture back in October where they lost to the Stormers by two slender points.
Stormers fans aren’t thinking that far, while Lions fans are scanning the horizon. That’s what happens when you’re on a roll. You look forwards, while those scrapping for their life can’t indulge themselves any further than to look forward…to the very next game. The match, at Cape Town Stadium in early June, might yet turn out to be momentous for both teams.
Which brings us to the Stormers, the frustrating Stormers, often betwixt and between, having lost three of their last five and four of their first six.
The Stormers have forever – endlessly, tiresomely – been on the cusp of getting things together this season. Only for things to fall apart. That’s what happens when you’re desperate. You can’t play, not really, and it’s added depth and character to season three.
Think of it like this. Desperation is a little like a rubber band. It stretches your focus forwards into the future and stretches it backwards into the past.
You’re desperate because you aren’t doing well in the present. You want things to be successful, like they once were in the past, so you look into the past for secrets and consolation.
But lingering on past successes has an element of the future in it, because, while you’re looking back, the place in which success is ultimately measured, is the future. So, desperation is not only a form of going back into the future, it’s a form of going back into the past. Looking backwards and forwards at the same time has its dangers.
Why? The elastic band of desperation is dangerous because successful teams work best in the present. Sport – and this also applies to Netflix dramas – is about nothing so much as negotiating the perils of the here and now.
A good batsman might be made to look like a moegoe, flashing and missing at five out of six balls, but he’s able to hit the over-pitched sixth delivery down the ground for four. That’s living in the present. And that’s what the Stormers this season have struggled to do.
Sure, the Stormers are an emotional subject, akin to load-shedding, overseas voting and Transnet’s serial dysfunction, and that’s not exclusively confined to the Cape. One of the ways to take the emotion out of the Stormers’ season, though, is to scrutinise the numbers.
Look at their try-scoring stats, for example. Going into episode 15, they have scored 43 tries, 11 less than the Lions incidentally, which equates almost perfectly to three tries per match.
Drill a little deeper and you might remember that in their opening two fixtures back in October, the Stormers scored four tries against the Lions and eight in their 52-7 victory over the Scarlets in episode two. That 12 tries. Forty-three tries all told minus 12 in their opening fixtures means that they’ve scored 31 tries in 12 matches.
Those aren’t the kinds of numbers that are giving coaches in Limerick and Glasgow sleepless nights. Put differently, by the end of last season, the Stormers had scored 69 tries. You don’t need to be close to a crystal ball to realise they’re going to be nowhere near that figure this season.
For a team who pride themselves on attacking brio and the ability to convert broken field into five points, the fact that the Stormers have scored only 43 tries all season tells a story. And that story is the story of a mis-match between ambition and execution.
Marry the number of Stormers tries scored with their 174 off-loads, the highest number of off-loads in the competition, and we can begin to trace the outline of an explanation. The Stormers play high-risk rugby, which looks worse than low-risk rugby when it goes wrong, which has more chance of going wrong because of what it is – and what it seeks to do in the first place. It’s adventurous stuff, which makes them both so frustrating and so exciting. To my mind they’re the most rounded character in the entire series.
The Cape Town gang is also low on confidence. Look at Manie Libbok, who might never fully recover from being substituted in the World Cup semi-final against England last October.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that it was the wrong decision. How could I? I’m simply suggesting that sportsmen are human beings. In their love of the game, their hearts get broken. Is Manie playing his rugby with a broken heart?
Add together the form thing (which is really a version of the love thing) together with the technical thing and the inescapable conclusion for me as we approach the end of the season, is that Stormer’s coach John Dobson, is grappling with the philosophical thing.
I haven’t had a natter with Dobbo for a while, so he hasn’t been exposed to the thoughtfulness and all-round perceptive brilliance of my A game, but I know him well enough to suspect that there’s a struggle going on inside that big brain of his.
Dub it the eternal struggle between pragmatism and romance, if you like. John is a rugby tragic. He wants winning to look good because he’s aware of the expectations on the stands and he wants to cater for those expectations. He has a photograph of Dylan Thomas, the romantic’s romantic, as his Whatsapp-profile pic, for god’s sake. He wants the power, but he also wants to satisfy the spectators’ need for the glory.
What he’s confronted with now is to whether to calm things down – and so compromise his beliefs – or keep on lashing away at high-risk, high-reward game the Stormers aren’t getting right. This weekend they play Leinster, who are unlikely to be as generous against them as they were against the Lions last weekend.
It’s an occasion that demands they stay in the present and – who knows? – possibly consider actually trying to kick their penalties through the poles given that their mauling game just isn’t working.
Yes, they continue to be injury-blighted. Dan du Plessis has only recently become available, ditto Frans Malherbe, he who, touchingly, dreams of being Cheslin Kolbe and swallow-diving to score in the corner in the dying moments.
Steven Kitshoff was up and off to Ulster at the end of the World Cup, and they’ve lost Ruan Nel and Deon Fourie in the campaign itself, both crippling blows.
Salmaan Moerat and Ben-Jason Dixon are resting due to concussion protocols, so continuity has been hopelessly lacking. There are a list of extenuating circumstances as high as Table Mountain. Nonetheless, Dobbo and his Stormers are staring at the crossroads and it makes for compulsive viewing.
In the life-cycle of every coach there are these moments, unpleasant to live through but great to look back on. One such moment involves the inevitable quandary as to whether to move loyal and much-loved players on.
One involves spending more money than you really have. One involves what you do with dearly-held beliefs when the ship is taking on water.
The Stormers aren’t sinking, not quite yet, but down below it’s cold and wet. It’s not too much to say that Dobbo is facing damp socks as he walks towards his Rubicon.
After Leinster, he and the squad board another plane to go north. In week 16 the Stormers play the Dragons, currently in 15th spot, at Rodney Parade.
After that they cross the Irish Sea for a tussle with Connacht, whom they beat in last year’s semi-final. Connacht are behind them on the log but tailgating them badly, so too close for comfort. Who would have thought that the biggest gunfight of the season would happen in windswept, Atlantic-facing Galway?
There’s another way to make sense of the Stormers, and that’s to point out that they’ve had no luck with that fickle mistress, the bounce of the ball. They lost all four games on tour in November, against the Warriors in Glasgow, Benetton in Treviso, Munster in Limerick and Cardiff in Cardiff, and, in a couple of them, it might have gone either way.
At no point on tour did they lose by more than 11 points (to the Warriors) while they only lost by three to Benetton, seven to Munster and seven to Cardiff. In the Cardiff match, if you remember, they fell foul of an 81st minute try by Cardiff prop Rhys Litterick converted by Tinus de Beer.
Until then it was 24-all, which would have given the boys in blue their first points on tour. It all leads one to suggest that the Stormers, with so much mixing and matching, might be both unlucky and not managing the game quite as well as they might.
The Stormers lost last weekend to the Ospreys, dubbed in some sections of the media as their worst performance this season so far, with the Ospreys heading up-country to Loftus for their next match against the Bulls.
Jake White’s team have a tricky run-in, more of this in a moment, but they’re helped by not having to travel, unlike Dobbo’s foot soldiers, who’ve spent far more time in the air this season than they have on the pitch playing rugby.
After the Ospreys, the Bulls take on the Glasgow Warriors and Benetton, both at Loftus, before wrapping up their round-robin fixtures away to the Sharks. At time of writing, the Warriors are second and Benetton fifth, so playing two such matches in succession will be like playing two back-to-back quarter-finals prior to their actual quarter-final, which will stressful and sapping, particularly without Marcel Coetzee.
But – and, as they’re fond of saying, it’s a big “but” – they will be playing at home. And they’ll be playing at home in the early winter sunshine in front of screaming men wearing hollowed-out watermelon hats.
They will be playing in conditions they know intimately and understand. Their biggest victories this season have come at home, which gives further reason for optimism. The crowds will be in and there will be everything to roar for.
In late October the Bulls beat the Scarlets at home, 63-21 and nine tries to three; a month later they beat Connacht 53-27, seven tries to three at Loftus; a week after that the Sharks arrived in Pretoria. They were despatched 44 points (and six tries) to 10, with the Sharks scoring a penalty through Curwin Bosch and being awarded a penalty try.
At the beginning of March the blue juggernaut was on a roll again. They put 40 on the Stormers, four tries to three, winning by 18 points. There have been times this season where Loftus has looked like the Super Rugby glory days when Vic was slick and Fourie du Preez bossed things like a boy king.
Yes, they have lost there (most recently to Munster) but their home record is good, unlike their away record which has seen away defeat to, amongst others, Edinburgh, Northampton in the Champions Cup, and Leinster.
More than any other South African side, however, the Bulls look capable of beating anyone with perhaps the exception of Leinster, who look like the best side in the competition and have done since October. Like Leinster, the Bulls are high-scoring and try scoring. At the end of round 14 they had scored 456 points and 59 tries, to Leinster’s 427 points and 62 tries, which suggests how close the two teams are. They also have the two form South African players of the competition in Embrose Papier and Elrigh Louw.
This third URC season for the South African teams has been played against the backdrop of big changes in the financial structure of the sport in this country. It’s reminiscent of the post Rugby World Cup win in 1995, when the sport fell helter-skelter into professionalism, sometimes clumsily and with indecent haste.
The challenge this time round is private equity and its role and reach. My news is that SA Rugby’s deal with American equity partner, the Ackerley Investment Group, is well on track. Due diligence has been done and the parties are in that time-consuming and frustrating period of sorting out the legal fine print. Rumours that SA Rugby is bankrupt are apparently just that, although it is moot in these straightened times as to whether the mother body can afford another competition.
The SA Cup, a competition nobody knows about and many who do struggle to care about kicked off at the beginning of April. It is not, need I remind you, a series on Netflix.
Some early fixtures in the SA Cup were hopelessly lopsided. In late March in Kimberley, Griquas beat the Leopards 88-0. The following weekend in Nelspruit the Pumas beat Eastern Province 61-0, while the weekend after that the Cheetahs visited Olen Park in Potch to give the Leopards a 76-5 hiding.
It’s difficult to see whose interests this serves. Perhaps it is a sop to the provincial presidents ahead of the Currie Cup, but that, too seems to be in jeopardy. Some think that the competition has no relevance anymore and there is a fat difference of opinion between the players union and SA Rugby, about the availability for the Currie Cup, of those players currently playing in the URC.
So, then, a familiar script, the heady brew of patronage, skulduggery, vaguely sinister wheeling and dealing and off-the-charts success. For most of us the backstory is too opaque, too persistent and too predictable to get our heads around.
Thankfully we have Netflix to fall back on. As season three of the United Rugby Championship rolls to a conclusion, we’ll tune in every weekend, sure in the knowledge that we’ll get drama packaged in a form we trust, understand and enjoy. Who could ask for more?