The Lions will lose a day’s training when they navigate a 26-hour journey to Swansea to battle Ospreys later this month, and the other South African teams in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship are reportedly in for a similar ride.
Vodacom Bulls coach Jake White got stuck into the SA Rugby bosses earlier this week for selling a fake vision of improved travel schedules for the URC, and expressed his hope that the Qatar Airways sponsorship would bring some form of relief.
According to a TimesLive report, layovers in Doha constitute the brunt of the travel burdens, and to such an extent that teams may miss more than a day of training and preparation. This is a big knock to SA teams who joined the URC on the promise that the days of heavy Super Rugby travel schedules were over, but it now appears to have been a pipedream, and looking at the Lions’ nightmarish 26-hour journey to the Ospreys, it’s worse than ever.
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“One of the sells to the players was that when we moved on from Super Rugby – even with business class to Sydney – you wouldn’t be that far away from home that often,” White told Sport24.
“There was even talk of overnight flights [in the URC]. We, for example, can go to Exeter one week for the Champions Cup, come back for a home game and then fly back to Europe for a URC game. [But] if you’re flying all over at various stopovers in economy class, it’s a problem.”
The Lions won’t be the only outfit feeling hard done by. Travelling overseas to face Glasgow Warriors, the Bulls will first fly from Johannesburg to Doha, before departing for Frankfurt en route to Glasgow.
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Travel is not the only obstacle SA teams will face. While the schedule of some teams will allow for the option of flying overseas earlier to mitigate the loss in training time, the URC agreement only covers four nights of accommodation for the touring party, which means those teams would have to pay for the additional day abroad.
Previously, Super Rugby subsidies took care of accommodation.
Photo: Twitter/@LionsRugbyCo
