The first season of the Vodacom United Rugby Championship was a roaring success but one prevailing issue that needs to be addressed is ensuring more strength-versus-strength matches next season. DYLAN JACK reports.
The URC came to a head at Cape Town Stadium on Saturday, and tournament chief executive Martin Anayi has promised there will be renewed focus on ensuring high-quality matches next season.
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Speaking exclusively to SARugbymag.co.za, Anayi highlighted the effect of the Test windows on the current structure. The South African teams were without their Springboks during the start of the season due to the Rugby Championship, and later in the season several of the northern-hemisphere teams travelled to South Africa without their top stars as those games came shortly after the Six Nations.
For this reason, Anayi would like to see an alignment between the Rugby Championship and Six Nations in the future, while at the same time promising that the URC bosses would do everything possible to make sure that the best players are available for most of next season.
“I think we saw after the Six Nations, the teams were fully loaded, other than Leinster who sent down a [depleted] team to South Africa and got beaten,” he said. “You won’t see too many more of those happening.
“Structurally, the big issue this year was Covid. We had to reschedule fixtures and the only time we could do that was during the Six Nations. We don’t want to do that, we are trying to avoid international fixtures.
“The main change I would want from the macro-global environment is to get to a point, as early as possible, whether that is 2024 or 2025, where there is a much better flow of rugby. It would make more sense for us to have Rugby Championship and Six Nations aligned.
“In one pen-stroke, you would have removed our biggest issue, the front end of the season for the South African teams. What we do is play the South African derbies during the Six Nations, but what would make it easier is to align the Rugby Championship and Six Nations windows, however that’s done.
“We can work around whatever happens in autumn. If they are creating a Nations League, I think that makes a lot of sense for us because our shareholders are the South Africa Rugby Union and the unions of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Italy. For them, the international game is an important part of their economics. We just want to make sure that we are not overlapping with them because we are using the same players.”
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Anayi hinted that the URC is in talks for developing a cup competition, but re-emphasised that the plan is not to add more teams and risk bloating the current structure of the tournament.
“It allows us to develop new competitions which can fill in gaps and do a job from a performance-pathway point of view. It could be a cup, like you get in England, and we are in those discussions now. We want to keep the URC shorter and sharper, quality over quantity, rather than just adding loads and loads of fixtures. The cream of the crop makes for a very good competition and we need to focus on that.”
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