Reports from Wales suggest that talk of the Cheetahs being included in a Vodacom United Rugby Championship Shield are “wide of the mark” and there are no immediate plans for expansion.
Hawies Fourie threw an interesting spanner in the works when, in an interview with Sunday newspaper Rapport, he said the Cheetahs could be offered a route back into cross-border rugby by being included in a URC “B Division”.
The Free Staters have been in limbo since they were excluded from the PRO14 two years ago along with the now-extinct Southern Kings franchise.
While the Cheetahs have been actively searching for a European competition to join, they were also left out when the Sharks, Stormers, Vodacom Bulls and Lions joined the PRO14 to form the new URC.
Since then, the Cheetahs have been left without an international competition, only competing on the domestic front in the Currie Cup.
“There is a meeting at the end of April with role players for a kind of B Division for the URC,” Fourie said. “It will be called the United Rugby Shield. However, it is not in our hands. SA Rugby has to come to the party. It’s been coming for a long time now. We have been promised since December 2020 that there will be a competition.”
However, according to WalesOnline, there is no such plan to expand the URC into a two-division set-up with promotion and relegation. The report states that a URC meeting was held last week and the subject was not raised.
The report states that while teams like the Cheetahs want to join the URC, the major focus for tournament chiefs are to ensure that the current makeup of the competition is successful.
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