Side Entry: Joining Europe is mere lip service if Pro14 is still being ignored

Personally, I’m still hungover after the Rugby World Cup celebrations, but the rugby tragics around me assure me they’re excited that Super Rugby is back again.

The 25th edition of Super Rugby began with the Blues hosting the Chiefs in Auckland, New Zealand, on Friday.

The new season began a full fortnight earlier than usual, which means it has coincided with the start of the Six Nations Championship, the Sydney leg of the World Rugby Sevens Series and Pro14 rugby.

There was so much rugby this weekend that you could have started watching the Sevens at 3am yesterday and finish with the Lions’ clash against the Jaguares at 1am today in a watching binge that would take in seven 15s games and 16 Sevens matches.

Yet, in all that excitement, if that’s the right word for those of us still sated by last year’s heroics, I don’t remember one person enthusing about the prospect of watching the Pro14 game between the Cheetahs and the Southern Kings.

In the three seasons it has been coming to South Africa, the Pro14 has received little love from the locals. The crowds have been even more negligible than the dwindling figures at Super Rugby and Currie Cup level, leading the two South African teams involved in the competition to look for smaller venues to fake an atmosphere of sorts.

Locals simply can’t get used to the Pro14 season, which is also active during the South African summer, and we’ve been conditioned to be devoted to Super Rugby, even with its travel inequities that directly affect results, biased refereeing and domination by New Zealand teams.

About the only time we’ve found Pro14 interesting was this week, when the original Spicy Plum (Steven Kitshoff’s isiXhosa commentary nickname due to his carrot top), Robbi Kempson, the former Springbok coach now coaching the Kings in an acting head coach capacity, let rip at the Cheetahs at what he perceived to be dirty tactics in their derby last week.

It hasn’t helped that the Kings and the Cheetahs, who were supposed to be the country’s pioneers into the European market, haven’t done particularly well. The Kings’ record in the competition reads played 51, lost 46, won four and drawn one. As easy as it is to blame the Kings for that state of affairs, they’ve been on a hiding to nothing since they were voted off Super Rugby and immediately had to join the Pro14 not only without a preseason, but without the bulk of the squad that made their last Super Rugby season such a strong one.

Even now that they have owners and their own funds, they just haven’t been able to attract the top players as a franchise that their Super Rugby counterparts are able to. Picking up other teams’ rejects, waiting for fire sales at over-resourced unions and making loan deals is the only way they can get talent.

Perhaps aware that nobody would be watching them – or the fact that they’ll be alternating between playing in the sweltering heat in South Africa and the biting cold in Europe – a lot of players aren’t exactly keen to sign with the Pro14 franchise unless they’ve run out of options.

The irony is that everyone involved in the competition, from administrators and coaches to players, has no doubt that it’s a tougher competition than it a) looks, and b) the Kings and Cheetahs thought it would be, thanks to the varying playing styles and sheer international quality of the teams from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Italy.

With talk of South African rugby thinking of migrating north should they ever get gatvol of their treatment by Sanzaar, one wonders how we’ll ever make it work given our struggles to accommodate the Pro14 tournament.

We need to make some kind of inroads into Pro14 as a rugby community if we’re to realise the dream of joining Europe.

• sports@citypress.co.za
• Follow me on Twitter @simxabanisa

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