Sam Warburton’s view that SA teams add no value to the Vodacom United Rugby Championship is ill-judged and completely wrong, according to Mark Keohane.
The former Wales and British & Irish Lions skipper, turned rugby pundit, asked, “Why South Africa?” after the first month of the competition when the four regional teams from the Republic combined won four from 16 matches up north.
Now, the Vodacom Bulls and Stormers are featuring in the league’s inaugural semi-finals of what was originally a Celtic Pro 12 tournament.
Three SA teams were also in the top five after the regular season, with the Bulls and Sharks producing an 83-minute thriller in the Pretoria quarter-final.
In his column for TimesLIVE, Keohane explained the Twitter conversation, picked up by Wales Online, where he challenged Warburton to qualify why he still objects to SA teams competing in the URC.
“In response to me, Warburton applauded the rugby culture and quality of South Africa but dismissed the URC as a [mixed-up] league, given the two-hemisphere context and the travel between South Africa and the north,” Keohane writes.
“The lack of a Welsh representative in the top eight obviously meant Warburton’s comments found favour among many disgruntled Welsh supporters, but I found the dismissiveness of the URC, based on Wales’ poor performances, insular and narrow-minded.
“South Africa’s inclusion to the URC is the best thing that could have happened to the Celtic nations and Italy. England does its own thing. Ditto France. In their absence, Ireland were too dominant in the old Pro Rugby, which was replaced by the URC.
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“Now everyone is a beneficiary. Ireland’s four provinces won one in eight games in South Africa and that was a 33-30 win for Connacht against the Lions. The message to the Irish giants for the 2022-23 season was that if you want to win in the Republic, bring your best team.
“The Welsh, Italian and Scottish players, like their South African counterparts, will only improve with every match played abroad and the Irish, so dominant in the past five years, will be reined in.
“Any league, in which teams two to eight were playing for the right to host a quarter-final in the 18th and final round is a quality one.”
